


Blood & Chalk

by glassywater



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Activism, Alternative Universe - Historical, Alternative Universe - Post-Colonial West Africa, Angst, Characters basically go through A LOT, Hitchhiking, Homophobia, M/M, Magic Realism, OCs - Freeform, Performative Magic, Recreational Drug Use, Religion, Unhappiness
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-06
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-09-22 10:25:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 43,572
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9603917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/glassywater/pseuds/glassywater
Summary: Sirius, as a scion of the Sokoto sultanate turned prodigal son turned disowned runaway turned activist meets Remus, as herdman's son turned witch's apprentice turned forest guardian turned university student.





	1. revenger

**Author's Note:**

> This work is one of the chapters of a longer story. I will be adding chapters and updating tags, characters and relationships. The story begins with a sort of prologue and then continues from somewhere in the middle.
> 
> I want to thank malapropism for being a beta from the gods, I am a huge fan of theirs and they were so patient, kind and are super talented. I also want to thank flourescentgrey for writing fiction that inspired me to write. For reference images, check out forestgospel.tumblr.com/tagged/blood+and+chalk and for reference articles, hit me up on that same tumblr and I'll send you some fun-scary pdfs I found on JSTOR.
> 
> I also understand that the location of the story, Nigeria, might be unfamiliar to most readers so if you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact me.

 

Remus knew of Sirius before they’d met properly. His angry face in the newspapers, his mouth open, shouting and gesturing from a raised platform amidst a sea of people. He’d only spent a few seconds looking at the grainy black-and-white photo the first time. He heard numerous rumors from the student body about Sirius’s involvement with the local AIDS clinic and its new sex education program. But the actions of the young progressive, true or not, interested him. He hadn’t thought of meeting him until his study group suggested going to a refugee fundraiser that Sirius’s activist coalition had organised. They promised that there would be free food afterwards. With a few hours to kill and no money for lunch, a charity polo match at the old royal stables in the town centre was the best offer.

 

 

After the public picnic, a girl from his study group, Laida and one of the organisers began to make eyes at each other. She had insisted they all follow Sirius’s band of aspirational politicians for drinks. The resulting bar crawl whittled down the study group’s party to four including Remus who remained stoically sober. At the next bar they entered, it was nearly one in the morning and he was fidgeting and preparing to find Laida to say his goodbyes. He didn’t recognise any of the people in several stages of drunkenness, either arguing fiercely, slamming hands on sticky tables or kissing fiercely, hands on bodies. He suspected they’d picked up stragglers because he remembered leaving the picnic with a little over twenty people. The numbers stayed the same but the faces had changed. He sat with a few of the arguing sort in a booth, wringing his hands in his shirt. When he looked at the bar again, hoping to see Laida, he saw Sirius standing for the first time by himself. This was the closest he’d ever seen him, even at rallies. Remus thought Sirius didn’t look too inebriated and would maybe offer him a way back home or at least know where Laida had gone. And he’d never spoken to Sirius before. He wondered if the real thing would let him down since he only knew the public persona he must’ve constructed. His feet moved to the counter.

 

Staying in touch with Sirius, he found out, was easy. He had a landline, regularly checked his postbox and was always in the city till late. You could meet him after a rally, before a meeting, during lunch or for a small dinner, even on the sidewalk for five minutes before he went up on a podium again. He had time to spare for everybody. So seeing him every day for four months was unremarkable. It seemed that now that he’d met Sirius in person, he was never far away. Sirius held a good half of his meetings on the campus since his most avid supporters were students. They stayed acquaintances and eventually became causal friends for the duration of Remus’s first semester at ABU. But it was only when he took a trip with the student activist group to the AIDS clinic that he realised the full extent of Sirius’s campaign. The strides the unknown and stigmatised LGBT community in Kano were taking with Sirius’s fervent assistance were large and unprecedented. When he returned home, Remus cut out a 4cm by 4cm photograph of Sirius’s profile in the current edition of the student paper and pinned it to his wall. In the picture, his lips were pulled back in a neutral line and his nose looked long and formal. It was probably taken at a meeting with a state minister, he remembered that Sirius had spoken cuttingly to the press after the meeting. The minister had been unrelenting. Even with the furrowed brow and stern face, his skin was still as smooth and cool as charcoal. He looked handsome, unbelievably so.

 

Despite his growing admiration for Sirius, Remus maintained a distance from him, remaining in his outer circles, seeing him at meetings, rallies and the occasional bar; surrounded by twenty other laughing people.

 

He told Sirius about May in January, a harsh harmattan month. Sirius had been complaining about missing Cambridgeshire snow and all of the global temperate region’s winter trappings. But it was hot and dusty in Kano. They were sitting in an empty meeting room after a nighttime progress report. It was a Sunday and Remus didn’t need to be anywhere in particular. As Sirius waited for a ride from one of his colleagues, he ranted about the unfairness of a local court’s ruling on a child abuse case they’d been discussing at the meeting. He got quiet eventually but his body still fizzled with adrenaline. His hand remained unmoving, a condensation-cool glass of water balanced on his knee. Remus was trying to distract him with anecdotes and encouragement (“In the next week, we’ll get it,” he’d said, “The judge’s secretary answered all those phonecalls and we had an audience with Barrister Suliman himself. We’ll get the appeal looked at.”) It hadn’t worked. After minutes of silence broken by Sirius’s audible gulps of water, Remus offered one of his secrets.

 

“My grandmother used to terrify me when I was younger. I did not know of her existence till I was eight. My father hates her but she changed my life.”

 

* * *

 

Remus already knew about the knife in his bag. His grandmother (The Dead Woman! The Witch!, the shrill voice in his head added) had passed it onto him. The stupid fucking knife. If he died on this disgusting expressway with writhing shivering heat mirages, he’d kill them both, as he had been telling Sirius while he slept. Since he’d met S, he had been fantasising about dying and killing. In reality, he’d been doing that for much longer, only now faceless villagers had melted into one enemy. Remus also knew that the knife was not really beckoning to him but rather that he was projecting his bloodlust onto the object. He remembered Sirius’s long tirade on object ontology from when they were still in Kano, some facet of metaphysics he’d studied at school that had gripped his mind. What crap came out of his mouth when his brain sludge went through the empirical strainer of cannabis. He and May knew that objects had selves much longer than any continental philosopher and his privileged society. It was the only reason they could be used as representative materials in rituals. Remus’ sometimes ill-disguised jealousy of Sirius’ sheltered and gilt-lined life was so convoluted, he spent time agonising over its inconsistencies and so then redoubled hate for Sirius had reared its ugly head. _(Haha!, it shouted, that’s not true you want to be inside his self his heart so bad it makes you so weak and afraid that every time he looks at you your mind cracks and shifts and splits into ever smaller pieces and he knows he is making you crazy look at what you are doing now lying in the heat, chased down the country like a bandit, about to die because of him._ )

 

The demon sounded like May. Even though he’d never mentioned S to her, she’d probably set up her connection through the blood river that ran by the cave and was spying on him. In fact, he was sure of it. In the weeks before they’d left Kano, he’d been unable to sleep because he was having foreboding visions of her death. Her enchantment probably kept him from recognising her meddling till now. It was best for him to keep trying to contact her, because she would know how to end it. Even in death, reaping the consequences of her many sins, she would have a firm hold on his calamities here. He’d botched the last three rituals he’d use to reach her, mangling the conduit process and Law of Similarity. But if he spent enough time trying to interpret the right series of contact sigils and replicants for the call, S would’ve grown tired of him and left or would’ve died in the forests. Dreams of his absence or his carcass plagued his mind and scorched him in the morning. A sudden judgement from the gods would save him and then he could return to his father and ask for leniency. It could end; the haunting.

 

He left S’s side and walked into the wood, murmuring his own spirit name in preparation.

 

Immediately the thicket offered itself to him.

 

He knew that it would not work because the witch moon was not out. He did not know the forest regardless of its apparent feeling for him; he did not know the blood to offer and he did not know the gatekeeper of the spirit wood. He also knew that he was going on a worthless journey that would reap nothing. The familiar ritual would only rub a menthol balm on his fractured mind.

 

Make yourself sacred. Die. Ask.

 

Since he had known her in life, he would skip all the formalities and only offer her a small greeting to respect her age, he thought. They were blood and the soil would know that. He sensed that the procession of the dead in the wood was many and he was afraid. He offered his fear to the wood when he arrived at the first bone altar, using his nsism. The gatekeeper’s refusal was immediate. His fatigue grew at an alarming rate and his limbs were heavy. He lay down, feeling lulled, comforted and wary but unable to fight the onset tiredness the gatekeeper must’ve caused. Mentally running through curd, he looked for some form of appeasement; someone to call upon or something to use. He angled his head toward a large rock on the ground and struck his head on the rock a few times, crying out, hoping the wood would be satisfied with his self-imposed anguish.  

Then a boy appeared, an apparition he had not summoned and did not recognise. It was somehow legion and alone; there were many spirits with the boy but he stood separate. Their eyes were red and full of water, their heads were bald and their teeth were like that of a large cat. Their skin was black and dense and reflected no light. R smelt the storm and the earth beneath him was suddenly wet. It looked like an ombriwim, the spirit family he generally avoided because of May’s transgressions against them. They knew his blood was hers and he had suffered many injuries of their collective anger.

 

It would not answer to him, it had no virtue.

 

In the next second, his nsism slipped away from his physical form and he watched his body from above. He knew that time slid into an bowl of water in the nsism state and he already began to fear that he would never return. The forest he was in loomed large all around him and all living things in it were folding into each other. He could not comprehend it. What could’ve been any amount of time later, he was the physical Remus again. It was colder in the wood. There were streaks of dusty pink at the edges of the carpeted sky above. He could feel cool liquid on his cheeks and his chin. His neck, arms and ankles also felt wet and stung with the rest of him. He knew that it was his blood, he knew the smell. After all sensation returned to his body, he stood and shuffled away from the rock, wiping the blood from his neck with his hand. Before he left the forest, he offered thanks to the wood, the gatekeeper and the Boy-Moon for sparing his life. Remus drew the symbols “broken”, “a simple point”, “clay” and two “long moons” and two “short moons” on the ground with his index finger. He used some palm fronds to cover the symbols and made a small altar of smooth pebbles and twigs. He had no sacrifice to offer but suspected that the Boy-Moon had taken more than enough. He stood, feeling ungainly and left the clearing. Less than an hour later, he was by the thinning edge of the forest. He could suddenly hear S’s long clear laugh. Some part of him was comforted that S had not abandoned him ( _you know that he wouldn’t you aren’t the only one who lost everything_ ) but he mostly felt fear. Moving closer, the trees gave way to bright headlights at his right side and moving shadows.

 

“Remus? You’re here.” Not you’re back, but you’re here.

 

Sirius’s hand shadowed his eyes but his mouth was pulled into a deep frown. He seemed to shake himself and continued, “These are my kinsmen -“ As he said that, the shadows revealed themselves to be laughing three or four men, either crouching and standing by a large lorry full of livestock. Sirius laughed with them and they jeered at each other.

“Yeah, my kinsmen,” he continued and they grinned again, “are going to take us as far as they can. We’ll be able to get to Lagos before the month runs out at least.”

Remus could not parse out the lie S had told the men from that statement. “Yes, well, that’s good then.” He arranged his face into a bashful grin. “How long was I gone for?”

Sirius beckoned him closer, his own grin broadening. “Not very long.” The headlights threw S’ face into heightened contrast ( _what is it? don’t you remember what he looks like?_ ) “I think we’ll get as far as Akure by morning.”

 

S’s hand ghosted his elbow.

 

They clambered onto the lorry. The four men had already filled the front to capacity and the only room left was at the back. The jokes fizzled out in the next hour and the men changed shifts to drive the lorry. It was cold and cloudy. The last car they saw passed twenty minutes ago, going in the other direction. The only noises now were grunts from the sleeping rams and the faint radio burst from the front of the lorry. A hand stuck out the driver’s side, wielding a lit cigarette. There was no time left and they could be in this truck forever, apart.

 

“Are you not colder on that side?”

Some time passed before S responded.

“No. You were gone and I knew that you were dead. I knew and I was waiting for your spirit to haunt me, you curse!” He lowered his tone and hissed, “When Abu and those guys stopped, I was grieving.” He crouched over R. His knees hit the centre of R’s chest, pressing into his lungs. “I could feel your nsism. What did you do? You have dried blood on your clothes and scars on your arms. I don’t know that magic. But I know that you were dead.” S leaned back into his corner.

S continued, “The earth, the shape of you in the earth was still warm and I was so frantic. Anyway, I waited. And then to feel the pull of my body, like something was detaching. I immediately knew that it was you. That thing we did on the rock at Zuma… I guess I did not really understand till that moment. I’m afraid of it. Are you going to looking at each other like this forever? I don’t want to be beholden to you, not to anyone.”

There were souls being overtaken on the dreaded double lanes, Remus noticed absently, looking at the flitting images of spirits at the road’s edges and in the surrounding wood.

“I do not know if I died. I may have.”

Remus sat up and continued. “Listen. I was trying to get May, I really think she could help me. Us… and neither of us should be here, chased away from our homes across the country.”

“We _decided_ to leave. Together. I don’t want to return. You can do what’s best for you.”

 “Why did you call them your kinsmen? Are they from the city?” Remus would never leave ( _would? you could never leave, he has trapped you!_ ). Remus considered moving closer. He was anxious - or perhaps he was only now aware that he was afraid of Sirius’s nonchalance. He could not differentiate between the feigned and the genuine. Sirius’s ability to hide inside his words and gestures still caught him off-guard. He wondered if this was his way out of the self-imposed cursebond that he and Sirius were looping and orbiting in( _you’ll never leave him_ ).

“They’re not from Kano. I think they’re from outside the city, one of the satellite towns, a sabon gari that’s off the road to Zaria. I had to guess very quickly which one.”

 

More time passed and the souls were being bought and sold, whatever was there festered.

“I’m sorry.”

“That’s just you giving yourself excuses. You’re giving yourself a way out. I don’t know what you did in there but it was careless and amounted to nothing.”

There was no resolution that R could think of, so he fell quiet again. He could not tell if it was unusual or not. They hadn’t eaten in two days and that could be why S was talking with venom in his mouth. He was tired and the rocking motion lulled him to sleep, on the floor of the lorry’s cab.

 

The men bought food from the roadside market in the new-born morning. They'd dropped R and S quietly and continued down the expressway. The faded road sign said “Ikare.” They walked towards the town, greeting the market-women as they passed. Licking hot oil off their fingers, they shared a few slices of fried yam passed to them by the cattle herders before they left. When the women asked who they were and where they were going, Sirius said that he and Remus were brothers going to Akure to look for work and had a contact there. Sirius could hide his accent deftly but his Yoruba was still rudimentary so he’d answered in pidgin English.

“Me an my broda, we dey come fom Benin to see our relative who get work fo us.”

 

They reached a particularly dense section of road with overhanging branches and rock faces that jutted out and Remus said, “The Ikare temples are renowned. May would talk about them after she’d come back with awe in her voice. She said the queen-witches here almost killed her a few times, she said that they’re different from all the cults and covens around because they hadn’t weakened. All the mass of power surging here causes some encounters.”

“What, like, phenomena?”

“Hm, well, if you want to use that academic term… I’ve only seen that type of thing once though. May left me on Are Hill for three days to practice a lot and so I was surprised to find traces of nymphs there. I tracked them for a while and eventually saw them eating the carcass of something. I was so scared, I was crying and trying not to breathe. There was a cloaking charm on me but the nymphs can see through it more often than not.” Remus paused for air, over-excited from the memory of the experience ( _Or maybe you just miss the power. Maybe you just miss May’s attention_.)

“Do you notice how the roads leading into the forest are decrepit? It’s not just the government’s negligence. The forest temple steals from the road, all the stored energy from construction is sapped away.”

“And what about the farmers, the women we saw? What do they do about it?” S asked.

“Sacrifice. Payment. They have a lot of respect for them. If we go in, we’ll see some altars and we might see something like the phenomena, as you call it - do you want to go in?”

“Yes.”

They stepped off the main expressway. Remus pointed out several of the altars varying in complication and purpose. There were many nests of twigs, earth and asphalt hung off branches of the larger trees. Fewer were altars of bone and dried skin placed at the feet of fruit-bearing trees. There was an elaborate one with small dried skulls and rotting food that made R smile and S shudder.

Walking further into the wood, they found a small stream that had some drying clothes laying on the bank and washed and drank from it. Remus was worried about the stream’s source in the forest but they used it anyway. They scaled some low hills and sat on large boulders, looking at dusty Ikare in the setting sun.

In the cool of the forest, some things were mended and balanced and accounted for. Dust settled.

 

 

 

“I had maybe the second worst nightmare of my year. My eyes closed,” Sirius said, “and it was as if the absolute opened in front of me. It opened its mouth like the yaw of something under the street. Like a present. I wish I was still there with you. You were holding my hand, like you had been while I was awake. I could feel it vaguely, like an idea. But the rest of me was cold and on fire. I think it’s funny now. Like of course, this death is here.  But I was falling through it, the darkness. All of my hypocrisy was there. All the guilt, every terrible thing I carried in my soul was there and they had voices. I think I did not know that I was dreaming. But it felt as real as this. I know that it happened. The threads of us, of maybe anyone I’ve ever seen. It was choking me, I was looking at my dead self. I hated myself and I could see all my sin, my wrong. Everything I ever hid from myself was there on my skin, tattooed. In that darkness. I was naked. Dead. Dying. I was sobbing. Wallowing in my soul.”

His voice broke and creaked, “My head is so broken. I think I am made of granules.”

 

Remus held him on the hot rock above the dusty town and said, “I have opened my face to you.You know the dirt that is in my skin. I am here to help you. I know that I am here to use blood and chalk to protect you.”

Sirius looked at his hands resting on his lap, feeling undeserving.

 

They were One, not Two.

 

 


	2. to be half, to be full

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Isa 9:2 - "the people that walked in darkness have seen a great light; they that dwell in the land of the shadow of death, upon them hath the light shined." 
> 
> Sirius, on Cambridge and Elliott.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This next chapter grew from the ashes of a scrapped piece of writing. The story jumps back to Sirius's university days and a formative time in his life.
> 
> Once again, all my love to malapropism for her genius and care and compassion. And also to flourescentgrey for giving me the encouragement I needed to write. I will keep updating tags as the story unfolds. For reference images, check out forestgospel.tumblr.com/tagged/blood+and+chalk and for reference articles, hit me up on that same tumblr and I'll send you some fun-scary pdfs I found on JSTOR.
> 
> There are some instances of condensation of time periods and historical events here, so it's not 100% accurate, but events like the Angolan Civil War and the MPLA are very real constructs. You can contact me for more info on these topics on tumblr.

Sirius’s first ever boyfriend was a white boy. British; a middle-class Londoner with charm like honeysuckle syrup spilling out of his open mouth. He was taller than Sirius and the captain of many collegiate clubs at the university. In hindsight, Sirius sometimes thought he wouldn’t have been able to resist him even if he hadn’t found Elliott attractive. He’d met Elliott through mutual friends and acquaintances from the debate society. He is very handsome, they’d said, and he’s very gay and we know he likes black guys. Habib had a photo of him in his dark room, still dripping from the acid bath. In the red red red of the closet space, Sirius studied the dark hair cut close to the scalp, a hairstyle he sported too but the boy in the picture’s hair was textured very differently from his own. He saw the serious glasses hanging on his nose and a bright laughing smile. Elliott was looking at something at his left that was outside the frame. Sirius thought he looked confident and not very gay. Habib reassured him that it was not a prank. 

 

“We’ve mentioned you to him, you know.”

“Has he seen a photo of me?”

“Yes, he was here two days ago, looking at the photo I took of you in March. He was giddy and very excited to meet you.”

 

They met a week later, by chance, outside a lecture hall. They weren’t taking any courses together but shared professors on some modules. Elliott proved to be very forward. A quick exchange of dorm room numbers followed. That night, Elliott sent a short note through a junior student in Sirius’s hall. Sirius re-read it a few times that night and kept it in his bottom desk drawer, underneath his unread copy of the Art of War, where no one would find it. 

 

They later officially met (aside from the coffees they shared at Trinity Hall Cafe weeks before) accompanied by friends at a student-run pub with a pool table and several local ales. Elliott bought Sirius many drinks and held his hand the whole night, even when he was speaking to someone else. Their friends had ooh-ed and aah-ed and shielded them from view when necessary. Sirius felt so happy, so relieved of the bonds and stigma that held him back at home. To be so publicly chased and wanted by a boy, in front of all his friends, was everything. 

 

* * *

The nectar in the flower soured.

 

After Elliott left him, he was manic for two months but was able to wean himself off hallucinogenics. Off blackmarket amphetamine in particular, which he and Elliott had done a lot of, whilst fucking (not very often) and whilst notfucking (at raves in warehouses on decrepit edges of London). His mania (spittle and all) drove out his flatmate. By then, the quaaludes had started to look like sharp rusty nails that would tear at his throat if he ingested them. He flushed them, sweating profusely and lit a joint right after. 

 

It was around this time that Habib showed up, looking very guilty. He said he wanted to go to a noise show in London.

“I actually thought you’d be in the college,” Habib said, standing in the doorway. Sirius had invited him in already.

“Well, why’d you knock?”

“I could smell the joint from the stairs.”

“It could’ve been from before. Or from another room. Were you going to leave me a note or something?” Habib stepped in and shut the door after himself. Sirius flopped back on the bed. Habib stood in the middle of the small room, his hands in his pockets.

“Yeah, I was.” He swayed a little on his balls of his feet. Nervous. He continued, “So, why aren’t you at the evening lecture?”

“Frederic is being a cunt about everything. My probation got extended.” Sirius looked away to brush the cannabis crumbs from his chest but not before he caught the tight grimace on Habib’s face. 

Sirius had tried to endear himself to his lecturer so as to reduce or repeal his suspension but he’d given up when showing up at her office sobbing did naught to her resolve. The lengthened extension left him to the wiles of boredom and his penchant for self-destruction had left him feeling somber. He’d taken to listening to tape loops and violent American hardcore he sourced from small labels out of Seattle that shipped to the U.K. The music had helped when Sirius flushed the baggies stashed around the flat. He didn’t know if he wanted to do much more than recuperate.

 

“Will you pay for the tickets?” Sirius lit the joint again. It had gone out. 

“Yeah, I did… I did. The train is at 7:30 and the opener’s on at 10.”

“That’s real presumptuous of you.” S paused to exhale. “I think you already knew I was on this extension. I bet Maryanne told you and now you feel bad. But I don’t care. I’ll go. I suppose we could find stuff to do before the show starts.”

Habib grimaced. “No, Maryanne didn’t tell me. I just went and asked.” 

Sirius ignored him and plowed on. “We can go drink chai at Brick Lane or something.” He stood and ambled into the small bathroom. It upset him that Habib felt like this whole escapade was necessary. That Habib felt somehow responsible for the series of actions that led him to his current state. He didn’t want misdirected pity.

He asked from behind the closed door, “How did you find out about it?”

“Um, just at the Stretch. There was a flyer on the door…”

 

Sirius stopped listening to Habib’s anecdote and looked at himself in the mirror on the cupboard. Unfamiliar stubble and deep circles ate up his face. The laceration on his left eyebrow had scabbed and dragged his eyelid down. He bared his teeth and winked at the wraith in the reflection.

 

The train ride to Kings Cross was quiet but not uncomfortably so. Habib looked out the window for most of it. Sirius caught his eye in the window a few times and offered a small, tired smile. Habib led the way on the tube and they walked up to Whitechapel from Aldgate. They approached a large dilapidated warehouse standing in an abandoned car lot. It looked appropriate. 

“How the hell do you know this place?” Sirius looked at Habib in disbelief. The wind whipped their coats around. There were no people around who looked like they were there for a noise show.

“I asked for really specific directions over the phone.” He held out a piece of notebook paper. “Here are the directions I got. It’s no big deal.”

 

After walking around the warehouse and trying the back doors (they were padlocked shut), they walked back onto the main street and found a pub. Habib ordered chips for both of them and they slid into a booth. The bar was empty but for a few straggling punks and posers smoking at the bar.

Sirius looked down at himself and thought that they were lucky to be left alone like this. He had worn his most non-threatening outfit: dark wool coat, dark jeans with some rips at the hem, a white oxford shirt and workman boots. The wrong end of Whitechapel could land the two of them in Nazi territory and they’d certainly get beaten up. Even there in Spitalfields, he’d have to keep his head low till the show. It was possible that Habib would be alright since he could pass for at least part-Bengali in his grey wrinkled suit.

 

* * *

 

Smack in the middle of a Wednesday afternoon, Sirius was melting into his front row seat during an informal seminar with nine other students and a lecturer. The lecturer had been discussing legislation put in place to protect British expats living and working in Commonwealth countries and the conversation had been steered towards criticisms of the black nationalism practiced by some graduate students at Christchurch. Many of the more privileged students enjoyed the opportunity to flaunt their racism disguised as logic and moderate politics in academic discussion. Sirius was contemplating walking out, which he had done a few times during the foreign policy and ambassadorship module that semester. He was called on by one of the girls sitting at the far end of the room to offer his perspective but he remained quiet. 

 

At his silence, one of the students postulating mentioned a “particularly nationalist” society called the Black Socialist Students Society.

“My former hall mate, this Senegalese man who moved out in my second year… I don’t recall his name now but he used to hold these meetings for hours with other black students. And he, one day, just casually mentioned it to me that they were nationalists. He showed me this Xeroxed flyer with a black fist on it.” The student, Henry, stopped to look at the enraptured group. “Yeah, I bloody know. I couldn’t believe it. Well, anyway. They hate the British is all I know. Don’t know why, Senegal was colonised by the French who were much more malicious than British Christian missionaries.”

 

S kept this information and recited to himself all day. He fixated on the morsel, the idea of an alternative for days. He looked for telltale flyers everywhere, on every cork-board in every common room he could get into. Only later did he think to approach Henry, at the end of a lecture that had gone late. August was rolling in gently and the wind had picked up. The yellow lights mottled the cobblestone path in front of the small patio. As the students exited the hall, S reached for Henry’s elbow. 

 

“Hey, I was wondering about the student society you mentioned at the seminar and-.”

Henry cut in, widening his eyes. “You want to join them or something?” S was taken aback and it must’ve shown on his face because Henry continued, “Oh, we all saw the way you acted alright? Like they were your damn comrades!”

“It’s not like that… I don’t really care about politics or anything. I just need to ask… about where to find West African food really…” S hoped Henry would buy the rather bad lie.

“Don’t think that I believe that. Not that I care anyway.” Henry moved his bursting satchel to his other shoulder as more students walked into the hall behind them.

“His name is Assane I think. I don’t know where he lives now but he mentioned LaFarge’s a lot. So if you want to be a ruddy Black Panther, have fun. Just know that it won’t get anywhere.” 

Henry dropped his voice and said without moving his lips very much, “If it was Daniel or anyone else you asked, you’d be out on your arse by the mid-term you know. That kind of nationalism can’t be tolerated.”

S smiled at him and said, “Thanks. See you Friday.”

 

LaFarge’s was a short-lease practice space/gallery/community centre. The practice space was in the basement, frequently let for short periods to poor art students from Central Saint Martins or Goldsmiths who could not afford studio space in London. Sometimes, bands would rent the space or use it for free, at night. The gallery, on the ground floor, ran for most of the year and was funded by the city council and the hard work of volunteers. The community centre on the first floor tended towards a more family-friendly vibe. Private schools ran events to introduce primary and secondary school students to contemporary art (if they couldn’t be bothered with the hassle of organising a big trip to London). All kinds of groups used that space: AA groups, book clubs for stay-at-home moms and apparently, black socialists. Phillip Denison, the owner, lived on the top storey alone with several dogs and transient boyfriends. S had been to the DIY art hub only once with an acquaintance whose face he’d forgotten. He could only remember that there were too many people in the small gallery and suffocating humidity.

 

But his hopes were high anyway. He went there on a Saturday afternoon.

The lady at the counter said the society used the space on the third Monday of every month. 

“But do you have their contact address or something? What about one of the flyers? Or do you know of this guy called Assane? He’s with the group and I’m just looking for him.” S’s ribs were pressing into the plastic top of the counter. Counter Lady stepped back a bit as S stretched across the counter and looked through a register. She shook her head at the last page and opened a few desk drawers. Then she handed him a flyer with a black fist on it.

 

“Here. That’s them right?”

He took it from her. “Yes. Thank you.” He folded it up and put into his jean pocket. 

“Um, if they or Assane come in at any time,” he wrote down his room number and college hall on an old receipt and handed it to her, “Give them this, please. Tell them that I’m eager.”

She takes it from him. “Okay, yeah…I’ll do that.”

 

He didn’t hear anything back. A few weeks later, S was in the Fitzwilliam common room, having just paid Habib a visit. A black guy is sitting on one of the dumpy couches, wearing reading glasses and peering into a book. S had never seen a black guy in Fitzwilliam, a historically white-only Cambridge college. 

 

He’d spent a lot of time in the past weeks searching for signs of where this society could be and here it was hidden in plain sight. Sitting on a lumpy couch in a common room. The black man in Fitzwilliam was Assane, who S had imagined as a lot older and with a more discernible accent. Assane frequently burst into very quick French when frustrated with a discussion. He took S to the meetings quite gladly and they developed a quick rapport. The meetings were less like meetings and were more long informal debates that took place almost every evening amongst the largest gathering of Africans Sirius had ever seen in at the university. The group would gather in Assane’s small living room and kitchen, eating pakoras. They would put on long players of Fela Kuti’s live records and fervently discuss the later nuances of the American Civil Rights Movement in the 60s. For the first few meetings, S was quiet in the background, observing in sheer amazement. 

 

The regulars he started to recognise were Seynabou, who was Assane’s fiancee; Joaquim, the Angolan; Kwame, who was Ghanian; Fatima, from Egypt and Assane himself. There were others who dropped by once or twice a week to mingle and smoke weed but it was transient. The people that S surrounded himself and learnt from were few but dedicated. They seemed like guardians to him, guardians of knowledge and the right way. He would go to sleep thinking of what one of them might have said to him during the day. He felt as if he was locating fragments of himself in their choice sweet-sour words of advice and jalebi offerings.

 

S would round off his studies or skip whatever evening seminar lecture he thought less important and start for Assange’s small flat on Pemberton Road. He knocked on the door at 7pm promptly everyday except Thursdays. Assane and his fellow academics would read passages from essays they’d written and news articles they criticised or praised. They were a set of pragmatic activists who felt caged in. They lent each other books by writers like James Baldwin and Toni Morrison that he devoured instead of large law textbooks and handouts. They seemed to S more like a collective than anything, a family that protected each other. It was also in this group that the torrid history of Cambridge’s treatment of non-white students was revealed to him. Sirius had assumed that racial discrimination had been dying out in the colleges, what with black rights movements springing up and the general advancement of time. It was not so. Every other week, some visitor would mention an incident in which they were heavily discriminated against, either by students or faculty. This filling of the gap of context in his mind, in the fabric of underlying currents in his life drive him further form his own fiends and acquaintances whom he began to avoid with flimsy excuses. He did not try to speak to them or anyone else about the anxiety he began to feel concerning injustices he had somehow been unaware of.

 

Joaquim had a falling-out with the group for two months over the Angolan civil war. He hadconsidered going back to get drafted to fight for the Popular Movement of the Liberation of Angola (MPLA), a party his whole family had been members of for decades since Angola’s independence. The socialist policy was in in his blood, he said, and he felt responsibility. When the group had not heard from him for some weeks after he made this declaration, a search was set up and they found him in London, waiting to get his visa revoked. They coaxed him back to Cambridge after much gnashing of teeth. This incident shook S to his core; Joaquim’s pragmatic, practical activism and his readiness to fight showed him the possibilities of enacting actual change outside of the lecture hall and Assane’s strange group of outsiders.

 

Ultimately, things reached a head within the group when Assane, who was on the graduate macroeconomics program, gave a shocking report of the Structural Adjustment Programs being implemented by the World Bank and the IMF.

 

“It has been established to reduce or diminish the budget deficits and fiscal troubles of developing countries around the world. The chosen county and its government will have to practise stabilisation policies as instructed by the IMF. They include, deregulation and privatisation.” It continued in that vein. A few times, members of the group would groan or ask for an explanation of a term. It was a short reading. 

 

In the hopeless silence afterwards; mildly sipping tea, Seynabou suggested they protest. They would get to the government’s ears if they persisted.

 

“I am angered at this flagrant misuse of power to destabilise newborn countries. I suspect a malicious intent beneath this. Privatisation and deregulation have not worked since Reagan put those policies in place, they certainly didn’t work during Thatcher’s era and they won’t work now. It is capitalist _merde_ , quite frankly, and we must fight it. We will no longer be stepped on by the boot-heel of our colonisers, comrades.”

 

She set her teacup down and went into the kitchen. Kwame followed her. The rest of the group listened to the sounds of running water and Kwame and Seynabou making plans.

 

S stayed the night at Assane’s house. He lay on the couch, listening to Assane and Seynabou murmur to each other while playing dominoes in living room. They had written out a framework for a long-running plan. An Operation. It was naturally capitalised in his head every time he said it to himself. The group would vote on a name change in the next week to something more overt. They had silently and unanimously decided not to include the other members of the group. Six African immigrant students from Cambridge, S thought. Who would listen to them?

 

Assane and Seynabou sat facing each other on the floor with the soles of their feet touching in places. They were kindly waiting for him to sleep. She looked over at him and smiled as Assane continued to move dominoes and mutter to himself. She titled her head and made a funny face at him. S fell asleep, about to make fun of Assane and reach for his ankle, which lay out of reach. His heart swelled of the familial comfort he’d been deprived of, he felt, for his whole life.

 

* * *

 

The opening of the heart. Is it the background? The congruity of ourselves? I search for you, I know that you remained outside fettered by nothing but loyalty to people you established fragile relations with. Only yeses and nos. You have not looked far enough from yourself. Do not share yourself, opening your heartmouth to dogs, the ones who do not find satisfaction in your desolate place. Seek me in the mirrored lake. Seek me in the wave of your hand. I will know your face when I see you and I will laugh and tears will pour from my eyes. This imagined joy.

 

Remus spoke to the ground and it opened up and swallowed him. He was cared for by the soul of the soil. And he wandered till his soles bled and then he wandered some more. And he did not leave the room. The curtain moved and the fly hovered.

 

He sat in the last rows of the church. The pastor spoke of ungodliness and the Son of Man. Remus’s hands moved in a trance, sweeping the dead air. His eyelids fluttered.

(Open your mouth and speak, devil.)

(Speak, devil.)

Blood curdles in a blackened pot. A snake’s eye is a sequin on a mother’s skirt.

(Speak, lover.)

 

He opened his mouth and licked the sweat off my forehead. I have died seventy items for seventy years.

(Speak, devilcurse.)


	3. newborn in the wilderness

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus, on forest spirits and trauma in the church.

there is something behind the door i can hear the creaking and the bright bright red red there i can see the gnarled hand of those that give me up for nothing i can see it it is here in my heart like a golden lance of joy i can see it and i’m not going to leave with them i am going to make it i can see it now its all there the gnarled hand of peace i can see it now i am overjoyed the blood flowing out of the animal in the grove it smells like deep love and roses and beauty with shining shining eyes of glory i can see it all the love the heart that is pierced in my chest i am loved by all there is nothing i am nothing there is nothing behind the door there never was and never will be am i certain now i am loved and will be forever like a child i will remain still locked in this delicious sweet beauty death i am longing for all of it and i have it all with me the sweet and the sweet the sweet the sweet the sweet the sweet libation of water on my body the river the river that gushes like a lion and the lion that will turn to me and carry me in its mouth i am the river i am the lion i am the oil of fortune and love and all the beautiful things that are the only things i am nothing i am joy and the sweet the sweet the sweet the sweet

 

there he is a dead moon boy with pools of water in his solemn collarbones like china and like joy like me in my mother’s womb with a loud rhythm and flashes of light and the sounds of those who gave me up for nothing like i can see that you have remained clasped on my ankle like an invisible shadow you finally come to me and i have seen you here you were always here to share the joy and the sweet water from the lionriver licking sweat from chests that is sweet like the river like the lion like me

 

 

 

“He’s dead!”

 

His senses recovered sharply like a pan to the head. Clang. There was screaming, unintelligible glossalia from the phantom throng of women and men in trances, wearing long white gowns. Remus considered standing up. He started to reach out to parts of him that were previously unknown, his arm was just recovering. Where he came from, he remembered clearly. He could not focus beyond his arm.

 

Hands began to reach for him. The church congregation became a singular body as they looked at him. All the eyes turned into one eye and all the hands felt like one large hand resting heavily on his shoulder. His legs felt very unsteady but he could not stay another minute amongst them. He’d see them again tomorrow regardless. And the sun was setting, he wanted to get home before his father did.

He nodded at the disbelieving pastor standing at the pulpit, who said, “We will see the end of your troubles soon, young man. The powers of evil cannot hold you forever.”

Remus walked to the door and left.

 

* * *

 

May had prepared very solemnly for the day. She told him weeks ago that she was doing a special dedication for him. She disappeared for some days and came back with a white goat and small individual bags of herbs.

Remus had then snuck away from his father’s house at night. When he got to May’s large compound, she patted his cheek and smiled sweetly at him.

“My boy, we are doing wonderful things tonight. Your skin will glow and you’ll trample on serpents forever. Let us go now.”

He shouldered the goat with its fore and hind legs tied together. May held the small bags so that they weren’t touching each other like precious rings in between her fingers. They set off in the deep dark for Are, the hill that sat like a resting princess a few miles in the forest surrounding the town. Remus could not see very much beyond his feet and relied on the sound of May’s humming and the slap-slap of her slippers. He asked her a few times what they’d be doing on the hill. She merely smiled again and said, “It’s very special. And I know that you’re thinking ‘what is May going to do?’, well, you’ll see when we get there. I’ve sometimes given you too much at once but I’m always there to help you, am I not?”

“Yes, you are, ma’am.” He replied. He believed what he said.

 

 

 

There were streaks of goat blood in the small stream bubbling from a cave deep in Are’s thick forest. Like agate stone with lines of dull quartz running though it, like shale, like flint. The moon shone on the river, and Remus felt vaguely shamefaced. He couldn’t recall how they’d got there. All he could recognise was the droning voice from the river and the slow current of water dragging along his shoulders.

 

May stood on the muddy bank, now wearing a large cloth with symbols printed on it like a toga and was holding the the goat’s horns. She appeared to be crying and screaming and cackling all at once. The river ebbed and flowed in harmony with her swaying body and the warble emitting from her. One by one, figures seeped out the thicket on the other bank like tea, like smoke, slid into the river and pulled Remus out the water. The figures multiplied and their hands multiplied and they cradled Remus like a giant mother and they sobbed for him. His body was a kite, fluttering paper with glittering ribbons and the sobbing increased.

 

May’s spells were soon over-shadowed by the anguished cries of the forest. She lowered the goat’s horns into the river and stepped away from the bank. She watched them, fighting her dread. She could hear Remus’s heartbeat all over the wood, in the branches and in the dead leaves. Like a haunting. She ran.

 

The forest continued to scream.

 

* * *

 

 

“I can’t find him. I don’t know… He came in last night, you know…. I saw him, I did. I saw him sleeping, clutching the blanket…. he was sweating… But I haven’t seen him…”

“Hey, get up.” The neighbour pulled Lyall up by the armpits. “We will simply look for him, yeah? He’s probably just run off into the forest and got lost.”

“I’m going to see my mother.”

“Why? Would he be with her?”

“She might know how to find him at least.” It was mid-afternoon and Lyall stood feeling disgraced and miserable at his loss of control. He felt around the walls of his mind and reassured himself that his worry wasn’t misguided. He’d already spent the morning looking for Remus.

“Ok, now dust yourself off. Go and see your mother. After my lunch, the boys and I will round some people up to start looking in the evening.”

Lyall nodded.

“Oh, you’re alright! We’ll find him. He might’ve be back home when you get back.”

“Hmm, yes…” He scrubbed his face. “Yes. I’ll go see her now. Thank you.”

 

As Lyall trudged up the hill leading to her home, May stood imposingly at the gate to her compound. She sneered at him.

“What is it?” she said.

“Have you seen Remus?”, he looked around the large plot of farmland surrounding her home. “Is he here?” He squared back to look at her. “Don’t hide him from me. I’m his father.”

“He’s not here. Is that what you came up here for?”

“I have nothing to say to you. But if I find out that you and your… practices, are somehow involved in this, so help me God, you will regret ever seeing me, or him.” He turned on his heels and walked back down the stairs carved from the hill.

May walked back inside and sat one the stool by the small stream that ran through the back room of the house. She began to scry. She broke some walnuts in a bowl and poured them into the river, then inscribed the sigils, ‘looking’ and Remus’s spirit name in white chalk. She sat with her feet in the river and she looked for Remus.

 

Three days later, the search party had grown in size, totalling almost fifty people, men, women and young teenagers who knew Remus. They’d searched most of the town by then and Lyall tore his hair out in frustration. He hadn’t eaten for days.

 

Some men, driving around the town edges, found Remus in an abandoned Voice of Nigeria radio tower far outside the town, by the federal expressway. The men were afraid because his dark skin was now mottled with light patches; on his face, his arms, and chest down to his knees. He was only wearing a pair of jean shorts with tears around the hem, his lips were chapped and his cracked heels bled steadily from walking. He was climbing a large electric pole that used to power the radio dish when they found him. Two men had to climb up and hoist him down to the others. He mumbled at no one as they drove back, with Remus sitting in the middle of the two men in the backseat. He soon got quiet and began to cry. To console him, they stopped and bought some soft drinks and fried yam for him. He ate ravenously and continued to cry. By the time they were back in the town, Remus was semi-conscious and trembling.

 

A messenger was sent to Lyall while he was at the police station. The neighbourhood gathered in front of his house to receive him. Remus was sitting in the parked car outside with some men standing around it to prevent the crowd from getting at him. When Lyall got home, he wrapped Remus in his arms and ushered him back into the house. Lyall led Remus into his bedroom and told him to sleep. As Remus slept, Lyall cleaned his bleeding feet with alcohol and wrapped them in cloth.

 

Lyall went outside to the crowd and told them that Remus was fine and asleep. He thanked everyone there and patted backs and promised drinks and yams and shook hands.

 

Two elderly women from the neighbourhood came by later to the house and said to Lyall,

“Your boy is cursed. That’s why he has changed. His spirit is now walking in the forest. That is why his skin is like it is. The light and shadow on his body, are they not like the lights and shadow the trees leave on our bodies? But for him, it is now a constant.”

Lyall remained silent. The women bowed to him and left. Like green snakes under the green grass.

 

Lyall spent the night awake by Remus’s bedside, wiping up sweat and holding him as he shook from his nightmares. The next morning, Lyall began to pack up their things. He knew that what had happening lay beneath the surface. He knew that May was involved in Remus’s disappearance. And he knew that it was irreversible, whatever happened. He could not imagine that Remus would really remember much of what happened and Lyall made up his mind to not ask. They would leave and escape May’s shadow of death and terror. She had ruined his son. They would leave.

 

He let Remus sleep into the afternoon and after he woke, they had a quiet lunch of pan bread and vegetable stew. Remus was vacant in the eyes but ate large helpings of stew Lyall brought for him. He sat at the wooden table afterwards while Lyall did the dishes.

 

“Remus, look at me.” Lyall wiped his hands on the dishtowel and sat in the chair nearest to Remus. Remus looked at him, still vacant.

“Thank you.” He put his hand on Remus’s knee. “I am sorry for what happened. You didn’t deserve any of it. I want to do a better job of protecting you. So you and I… We are going to leave here.”

Remus dropped his gaze down to the hand on his knee.

“Is that okay, Remus?”

Remus nodded.

“Okay. We’ll leave today. I don’t think you should tell anyone till we’re settled.” Lyall stood up. “We’re going to be fine. We’ll go to Yola, it’s a big city, you know, but I know someone there who will put us up until we have a place of our own. And you don’t even have to start school right away. And you won’t have to talk about anything until you want to. I promise.”

Remus nodded again.

 

 

In the early morning as the sun made its slow ascent up the sky, Remus and Lyall took a bus from the empty depot to Yola. They stayed at Gideon’s house, a close friend of Lyall’s from childhood who moved to the city after finishing from the state university, with his new wife. The house was a low gated bungalow with an open courtyard in the centre and many intersecting rooms. The rooms were covered in crosses and there was an Infant Jesus of Prague replica statue in the main room above the television. There were four other children in the house, two boys and two girls with the youngest at 4 years and the oldest at 14 years. They all attend the same school and walked hand-in-hand when crossing the street.

The whole family stood in the threshold of the house when Remus and his father walked through the gate which swung loudly behind them. A minutes of silence passed as they appraised each other and something stirred within Remus. As the air snapped back, the two friends embraced each other and the wife and children made generally welcoming noises, albeit still from the doorway.

 

Much later, Remus and his father sat to eat sandwiches Mary, Gideon’s wife, had prepared. Gideon looked at them with pity in his eyes.

“Oh, Lyall! I don’t remember Remus’s skin looking like that! He’s really grown a lot from when I last saw him. He was still a bundle in your arms, old man!” Gideon chuckled for a while until he noticed the wide-eyed look both Remus and his father were giving him. One scared. One furious.

 

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Lyall continued eating.

 

The questions ended after that and Mary led Remus and Lyall to the spare room.

“I’ve prepared the bed already. And there’s a spare mattress on the floor for you, Remus. I’ve put blankets on the dresser. Dinner will be ready in two hours if either of you want to eat.”

She seemed to gather herself up and added, “And I’m sorry and I’m sure Gideon is sorry, for what happened. I don’t know the details but we will do what we can to get you back to normal.”

 

Lyall said from the bed, “Thank you. Remus and I appreciate that.”

 

 

Gideon’s family lived a very religious life, something neither Remus nor his father was familiar with. On Sunday, they invited Remus and Lyall to Heart of God Ministries and Lyall couldn’t find a way to politely refuse. They clambered unto a grey station wagon, all the children in tow, in their Sunday best. Heart of God Ministries was one of the later branches of the _Aladura_ movement, a charismatic Pentecostal Christianity that focused on sacrament, the Holy Spirit and aggressive prayer.

After the service, Mary suggested that Lyall and Remus seek counselling from the head pastor. While cutting hot peppers for a stew, she said, over the smoke and heady scent in the small kitchen,

“I think you should take Remus to see our pastor. It would be helpful I think. I definitely vouch for him, he’s helped us through troubling times.”

Lyall was sitting on a stool, bouncing the four year old on his lap.

“Mary, Remus and I aren’t particularly close to your God. But I want to be open.”

She wiped the long knife on her apron. “You’ve been father and mother to that boy. And I think you both deserve all the help you can get. That’s all I’m saying, hm? Just think about it.”

“Yes, you’re right.”He looked up from the child in his lap. “Thank you.”

She smiled brightly at him and stirred the pot.

 

That Thursday, Mary drove Lyall and Remus to the church in the early morning. As they got out the car in the parking lot in front of the large building, Mary clasped Remus’s hands in hers and told him he’d be fine.

 

Inside, Lyall and Remus were led to a side office by some servers sweeping the ground floor. The head pastor, a Mr. Ehosa, sat in a small office with only one window. He was wearing a purple robe over a dress shirt and khakis. He also wore a white mantle embroidered with gold and a stark white collar. Remus was surprised by how young he was.

“You must be the Lupins. Please sit down.” He gestured to the chairs.

“I’m going to get right to the point. I had a vision after Sister Mary called and I will retell it to you.” He steepled his fingers and looked right at Remus. Ehosa pointed at him and said, “You. You’ve been devastated by something. And your father can’t help you with it because you don’t even know what happened.” Ehosa leaned back in his seat and put his hands in his lap.

He continued, “I was not given a clearer picture than that. But I need you, Mr. Lupin to co-operate with me to protect your son from getting lost in the darkness.”

Lyall says, “What you’ve said is true. And we’re not Christians, but we are seeking help from you and your God if you will allow it. I will co-operate with you.”

Ehosa and Lyall shook hands.

 

* * *

 

Remus stood over his soaked mattress. He looked at Lyall’s sleeping body turned to the wall. The stains were red. He was bleeding from his side. He lifted his shirt and touched the thin scratch marks.

 

“Am I dreaming? Is that my blood?”

 

* * *

 

Ehosa called the sessions “deliverance work”. Remus took the bus to the church every other day for the 4pm sessions. They lasted an hour and a half. Ehosa was often assisted by other younger-in-the-ministry pastors and they would say long repetitive prayers and confessions that made Remus roll his eyes back in his head and he would begin to scream and thrash on the floor or sometimes he would be quiet, sitting in a corner with his arms folded over his body, as if he was protecting himself from danger.

The pain was always fresh and relived. Open meeting wounds and shadows that wept.

Ehosa would pour a bucket of water the pastors had prayed on, on him after each sessionand then give him a stale cracker (“The body, Remus!) and sweet grape juice (“The blood, young man! salvation for your unclean soul.”)

 

Remus dreaded the “Holy Ghost” sessions the most. Ehosa and two other men and a woman wore all white and sang and clapped loudly to trance-like drums played by young boys in a corner. They went into a daze and cried.

“Please, God! Touch your son! make him whole!”

Remus was so anguished by these pronouncements that he would cry as well and his whole body would convulse and shake with unfamiliar grief, like shedding skin. He closed his eyes and saw such lights and brilliance and it made him cry much more. By the time the session ended, Remus was weak and crazed and he spat the Body of Christ on Peterson’s bare feet.

Ehosa held his chin and said, “You will soon know Christ and your father will love you again.”

 

Remus dreamt vividly of the Are forest and of May. They cycled through bloody battles in which he would be a foot soldier for captains whose faces he couldn’t see and warm, damp places where he had no sight but he would feel cold earth beneath him.

His body was rent apart in the night.

In the mornings and afternoons, he would sleep in and then wake up to a quiet house. Lyall would be out looking for work or a flat or a way to get his footing in the city; he would sometimes leave a note or something for him. Remus would eat his cold breakfast in the kitchen and then sit in the back garden for hours, looking at his new skin. He would enter a trance while doing this, without fail. It was as if his consciousness was eager to flee at any moment of stillness. He felt severely unfettered when it happened, though the trances never seemed to last more than two hours. He kept a notebook by the wicker chair he sat on in the garden and tried to flesh out some of the visions he had.

 

(arm extending past self into dark space????

hip bones jutting out of body. dogs.

SOBBING SOBBING SOBBING (may?)

cold earth. terracotta. undulating mass in mirrored room.

geometry, some kind of square/triangle configuration in rainbow colours

a circle with a cross inside… on my body (look for scars tonight))

 

He came back into his body and went inside to drink water and orange juice in quick succession until he felt centred. He made a small lunch after, for him and the children when they returned from school. The children had been told to keep away from him except when necessary so they usually ate in the living room while watching television, only saying thanks in unison. They would go into the garden or to a friend’s house to play and leave him at home. Sometimes, Cynthia, the oldest, would stay back to study and she would sit in the dining room with Remus and read her English passages aloud.

The day ended soon after, as all the parents returned home; Mary would usually be home first to make dinner.

Lyall would ask Remus how his day was. Lyall would recall some funny anecdote from his day for Remus, laugh and fall asleep.

Remus stayed awake chasing ideas of himself in his mind, trying to piece what had changed and what had remained the same. When he managed to sleep, he was tormented and comforted.

 

 

Two months later, Lyall found a small flat with one bedroom in the suburbs with money he’d gotten from his new job as a site foreman for a construction firm in the city.

The flat was on the second floor of a four storey block. The walls were a chipped cream and grey. It had a small terrace looking out onto the small street with plump guava trees and bougainvillea shrubs. Inside, it was composed of one large room in the middle which served as living room and kitchen, there was a shower and toilet in a room to one side and one bedroom with a closet at the other.

Lyall made a dinner of fried plantains and tomatoes he bought from the market over the kerosene stove.

 

“It’s very different from the house in Are but I think I like it. At least it’s furnished and that looks like a nice street. And the bus stop isn’t very far.” He turned off the gas and set the plates down. The sun was setting and the orangepink light came in through the open sliding door that led to the balcony.

Remus said in a rush, “I don’t have to go back to Heart of God, do I? I mean, now that we’re here. And it seems really far away. And we don’t have the money to spend on transport anymore, and I don’t think Mr. Gideon’s going to want to pay for the sessions anymore. Now that we’re here, I mean.”

Lyall put his fork down. “Well, I don’t know. I don’t think we’ve even really talked about how they are going.”

Remus grit his teeth. “They’re fine. I’m just thinking about the cost, is all.”

“Let’s talk about them properly now. How are they fine?”

“Pastor Ehosa’s doing his best.”

“Has he come to any conclusions about what happened to you?”

“I don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

“But we should. I’m your father and I want to know how you’re doing.”

Remus pushed his plate away. “Okay! Well, I don’t want to go to Heart of God anymore. I don’t think it’s helping. I just want to be left alone.” His voice rose at the last sentence.

“I only did what I thought was best for you, Remus.” Lyall sighed. “You don’t have to continue. Was he hurting you somehow?”

“No. He wasn’t. It’s just that…. the sessions, you know, they made me really tired.”

 

Remus got up and washed his plate in the sink. A shadow moved in the corner of his eye.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There are some heavy religious references here aside from the more obvious ones. I researched religious ecstasy, Catholic mysticism and the story of Saint Teresa of Avila as well as Padre Pio. I have a tumultuous relationship with religion and with my family. These complexes are weaved into the chapter, I suppose because it's the only way I can effectively deal with these feelings.  
> Much love to malapropism, a gem for all time; and flourescentgrey, a champion of the strange in fanfiction. They're both fantastic writers with work here on A03.  
> I'll be on leave this week because I've got an exam coming up but I'll try to put up the next cycle before the end of March.  
> The towns, the church and the Aladura movement are all real constructs. Feel free to contact me on tumblr as @forestgospel for more African Christian history fun.


	4. pentacle

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus and Sirius, on Ibadan and being young.

 

 

> "Ibadan,
> 
> running splash of rust  and gold
> 
> flung and scattered
> 
> among seven hills like broken
> 
> china in the sun."
> 
>  - J.P. Clark

 

 

* * *

 

  

there was no way we could have expected what happened in the city. i suppose he was more frightened than i was but i cannot say for sure.  he was sitting quite some ways away from me. the bus was hot and smelly, and from the small corner i crouched in, i could see the back of him in the cracked leather seat, sweat glistening like venom. a woman with a dozing baby in her arms stared at the nape of his neck also. i imagined the line of his jaw. 

we had not discussed a time at which we would get off the bus, or what we would do when we got there. he still ambled off, like a local, like an indigene and i scrambled after him. i have always felt ungainly in his presence but my limbs were at their most uncooperative that evening. i could feel myself peel away from my skin from my flesh and capillaries, as if to hide my obvious yearning thoughts from him. my whole self for the blood devil curse as i know him. the apparition of time and place that i stalk like a grasshopper at noon. not too empty but dragged across the asphalt, chained and linked and bound by three times tied ropes of horse hair.  but there were headlights, loud cars and loud music. my senses did a full recoil at this as i stepped into the gutter to follow the wound back of my curse. kerosene lamps burned everywhere. 

evening time leaves are stuck on your body, my sweet child. how am i to desert you in this desolate place where we will both die? i will reach for your arms and you will refuse me like a meal off the enemy’s table. as if i do not know you.

the markets were raging like stampeding cows and livestock. suddenly i rammed into your back. when did you stop walking? what are you doing at a stand bugling of red red tomatoes. you picked one and bit into it, splitting the paper skin like a war hero. how have you not seen me? who will look at me if you don’t? how will i know that i am real if you do not see me? you did not answer the catcalls and jeers of the market people. like a sliver of something, like sand. you have eluded everyone and succumbed to your mind. like a imagined thing. stark crosses in living rooms. i have your memories like eggshells to trip on and shatter. do not think that you are now excused from all hurt because i have excused you from my own. your heels will bleed again.

we stop under a bridge as cars roar past and a language we do not understand. there is rubbish flowing from some unknowable place under the ground. you are laughing, like you are on the top of a mountain and like you have killed someone. i want to join you, find warmth. i am disgusted by my own wants.

“sheer foolishness. we sleep here tonight, s.” you lie on a pile of dirty cartons.

 

we are rescued by tall dark skinned men in long flowing robes and familiar caps. one of them is smoking. we only wandered here in the early hours. “where did you come from?” one of them asks us.

you are looking mad about the eyes and i spot some blood on your fingers. you answer, “from kano, or kaduna. it’s been a long trip.” our language is moulding your mouth into a sneer. i don’t recognise you for a second.

they are all merchants and we are fed and sheltered out of feelings of kinship or recognition. you seem always eager to leave to bite to eat to flee. maybe i am only just noticing your skittish nature.

you become a store room boy. in the room where we both sleep on a mattress. so often i only see the whites of your eyes in there. and the quiet tapping and smooth swipe of our feet on the dusty floor. i look at you with envy. how you have managed to become so new and willing and fresh for all things. i feel i cannot touch and do not look at you for the first few days except in the night with the crescent streaming through our window and then i look at you and your leaves and your broken things, sitting in a glass case like some precious gem i have been gifted by a foreign princess. 

 

“you’re fucking losing it.” 

are you laughing? what is that? are you hiding it in a mirror under the sole of your foot? you are a sorcerer.

“i can’t open my eyes to look at your face.”

“i don’t know a doctor here, you know. are you crazy? are you a crazy person and you decided not to tell me until we’ve become nothings?” your pupils are dilated and you still laugh.

i turn over onto my stomach. your cool hand is on my back. there is the recognition. i do not feel so centred.

 

garba says that i am a handsome boy in the morning over the hot fire on which he is stirring curd. he asks me to be his delivery man and says that he will give me nice tunics to wear and take me to a barber.

your face is a cold knife. you ask me to twirl for you.

“you look funny. i’m used to seeing you in jeans and tatty shirts.” you turn back to the large notebook on the table. you got a haircut too. “have fun.”

 

 

Ibadan is a duality, a monster of British empire and tradition etched on skin. It naturally camouflages its people and celebrates them with heat stroke and torrential rains like weeping, in which its children run across wide highways and slip on the wet tar and ruin umbrellas and yell. 

There are markets everywhere, sitting in the trash with abandoned children and flamboyant couples in gaudy gold, driving past in long fast sedans and SUVs stacked like houses. University students constantly gathering, fighting each other at bus stops and whispered conversations behind dorms. The di-dum-di of drums echoing days after, mingling with the beats of rooftop parties and the hearts of dark-skinned girls spitting blood out their mouths, mingling with the sound of the infinite rain, hammering on tin roofs and satellite dishes.

 

They woke up to the smell of fried meat and left the bridge.

 

“It’s so early in the morning, maybe someone will pity us.” Remus mumbled.

“Pity? You must be hungry then. I don’t think I’ve ever heard that word out of your mouth.” They walked down the empty street and continued into an even quieter crescent of storefronts. 

They had names like: GOD IS LOVE STORES, ALLAHU AKBAR TAILOR, HONEY OCEAN LIMITED, USMAN STORE AND GROCERY.

 

Remus pointed to a house further down. There was a man standing over an open grill outside. There were a dozen or so skinned half-calves hanging off a rail attached to the top of the grill and large bunches of lettuce and tomatoes still on their vines and skewers tied together with rope. The man balanced a radio blaring Arabic sermons on his shoulder with one hand and attended to the meat with a poker in his other hand. He wore a cream coloured tunic and matchingtrousers and wore large spectacles that widened his eyes comically. They noticed all this as they walked towards him.

 

He studied them as they approached him. He said to them as they approached, in Yoruba:

“What do you want? I’m not selling for another two hours.”

Remus bowed to him with his hands pressed together like he was praying. With his back and neck exposed, he replied back in pidgin English: “Please help us, me and my brother are very hungry. We have not eaten in days. We will do work for you if you can spare us some food.” 

The man was silent for a minute. Sirius bowed too and added, “We would be ever grateful.”

The man turned off his radio and said to them in English. “Where are you from? You can’t be from here.”

Remus rose back up, “We are from the North. We are going to see our relative in the delta to work on an oil rig.”

“Where in the North?”

“We are from Kaduna.”

“Hm. I am Garba. I’m from Kano, but I’ve lived here for a long time. My family are in this house.” Garba returned to the beef and took it off the heat. “I will help you. This feels fated. I have been thinking of Kaduna a lot. I have some family there and I would like to go back to see them.”

He pointed to some newspapers sitting in the ledge behind him.

“Grab some of those so that I can give you this portion.”

 

 

Garba agreed to help them for a period until they got back on their feet. He introduced them to his family and the rest of the Hausa-Fulani majority neighbourhood of traders and tailors once the stores and businesses opened. They walked up and down the street greeting people and answering questions. Remus grew more and more taciturn so Sirius took over the oration later in the day.

For dinner, Garba’s wife, Hauwa, made mashed rice and vegetable soup. Remus stained his clothes with oil and washed dishes while laughing with Garba’s two children. He bathed them and told them stories as they went to sleep and they became attached to him. Hauwa laughed with him and touched his elbow often and they ate hot porridge spiced with ginger on the front steps of the house.

 

The next morning, Garba created jobs for both of them.

He said to Sirius, “You are handsome so I think you will help with me with deliveries. The old women I work for will like to talk to you. You will get lost at first so try to leave the house early.”

And he said to Remus, “I’d like you manage the shop when Hauwa is busy. You can do inventory and help her with the stockroom. There’s a little space in there where you and your brother can sleep on the mattress.”

 

Remus worked as the stock boy for Garba and a few other merchants on the main street called Farida Turaki. He went to the abattoir every other morning with two butchers that frequented Garba’s shop and chatted with Hauwa and walked her children back from school in the afternoon. He drew up accounts and wrote weekly sales reports. Sirius took buses, commercial motorbikes up and down the GRA and Jericho and the rest of upper echelon Ibadan. He gasped at the affluent wealth hidden behind tall hedges and palm trees and quiet cars and even quieter people. 

He started his day with several bags of heavy lace he would strap together with ropes and sling the bundles on his shoulders, visiting salons to buy and price match fabric. He got lost frequently and asked for directions, stammering the few Yoruba words he knew to passersby. 

Some of the ladies would offer him a bottle of water for his troubles and slip a few hundred naira notes into his palm as he shook their hands goodbye.

 

 

S met Jamila on a run for Garba. It was a large mansion in the Jericho area with too many verandahs. It had been a long day for him and he’d been looking forward to hot milky tea and laughing at Remus in their tiny stockroom-heaven. 

“You should come in. You look like you need to sit for a bit.” He’d agreed, opening his mouth before his mind decided to.

She led him through a dark lobby and anteroom he barely registered. They went off into an overly lit room. He was sometimes invited in by Garba’s customers while they would try on their clothes and tell him off for any shoddy tailoring. He carried around a notebook and measuring tape to note alterations and some of the curse words the customers used, to repeat to Remus.

She beckoned him onto a cream leather sofa that swallowed him.

 

 

Jamilatu Yetunde Adunni of the Abiodun house was fair skinned and plump. She came from a long line of royal and influential Yoruba people who frequently rubbed shoulders with the famous Ransome-Kuti house of activists. She was fascinated with the occult and the Yoruba pantheon of gods and with the dredges of the Nigerian Youth Movement still active in pockets of socialist Ibadan. The meetings were mostly held in the front parlours of lecturers from the university with their wives and colleagues and students they had discipled.

Her parents were descendants of a famous Alaafin of Oyo from the 18th century and both of them were part of the first consort of Nigerians to be educated in the UK. Their own grandparents had gone to parties at Kirsten Hall, the home of socialite, mystic and renowned Nigerian nationalist, Herbert Macaulay, several times.

Jamila enjoyed the music of Ebenezer Obey and afro-gospel fusion and played tapes in her Volkswagen Beetle as she drove Sirius back to Sabo. She invited him to Agodi Gardens for a night showing of the new Ade Love film.

 

She was saying about the director, gesturing wildly with her hands flying off the steering wheel, “I met him, I think, at my mother’s birthday party a few months ago. He was very nice and brought his younger son with him. They’re grandiose people, those filmmakers. But he said he’d put me in his next film if I wanted. As an extra of course, but wouldn’t it be funny?”

She screeched to a halt in front of Garba’s shop. Before he got out of the car, she pulled his arm and said, “You should come, really. Meet new people and drink and have a good time. You can bring your brother with you.”

 

Remus and Sirius took off next Thursday night. They walked through the night market at Onireke to Mokola and went up the hill till they got to the Gardens.

They saw several gatherings of people in the valley that spread out below them. They took the stone stairs down into the plain and in the trees they could see people writhing and shifting.

In a minute, they saw the white screen and the flickering film. As they walked towards it, Jamila rose up from the group sitting in around the screen and waved at them.

When they were right up by them, Jamila said, “I’m really glad you came. I wish I could introduce everybody but the film’s already started and none of them will bother at this point! Sit down, sit down.”

She walked to a nearby cooler and handed them two beers. “You can have this. The film is subtitled so no worries about language. I’ll talk to you guys later.”

Neither of them knew who Ade Love was or were particularly interested in cinema so they mostly dozed in the grass and listened to whatever the group was saying about the film. 

“Honestly, Mujiola isn’t that great an actor and I will continue to say it because I’m right….”

“… Unrealistic to me.”

Someone said in reply, “Ade Love doesn’t deal in reality. This is about Nigerian consciousness, you dimwit!”

 

As the credits rolled, Remus and Sirius sat up while the group folded blankets and lit cigarettes.

“Who are your friends, Sal?” A frighteningly skinny boy in a denim jacket said while looking directly at Remus and Sirius.

Jamila smiled brightly at them, “They’re my friends, our new converts. Go on! Introduce yourselves.”

The boy leapt towards them, “Let me go first! I’m Mike, it’s very nice to you meet you both.” He swept his arm theatrically towards the people talking amongst themselves and laughing.

“This is our little club of wastrels. They are cleverer than they look, I assure you.” He said this in a stage voice, his intonation was very English and he seemed to laugh at himself while he performed.

“Now, and this is very important, did you enjoy the film, hm? Has Ade Love done it again? Is it another hit?”

 

Sirius replied, “Ah, well. Neither of us have actually seen any of his films before so… we’re not good judges.” 

Mike folded his arms and made a mock-thoughtful face. Then he clapped his hands and said cheerily, “Not to worry. The only one who cares about him is Romi, she’s an aspiring director. Avoid repeating that to her.”

Jamila said to them from a ways away, “We’re going to Cocoa House, it’s been unanimously decided that tomorrow’s Comparative Lit class is dispensable information and getting drunk is a good idea.”

Mike replied, “Hear! Hear!”

The group yelled back, “Hear! Hear!”

Things were bundled up and boys and girls walked back up the hill, arms linked and laughing riotously. They got into cars parked haphazardly on the street and Remus and Sirius were separated and questioned thoroughly in fluctuating tones of cynicism and friendliness. Songs by Fela Kuti and the Africa 80 band and Dire Straits, a band from London, blared from the speeding cars in equal amounts.

 

Cocoa House was a skyscraper in the state ministry district but the name referred to the bar and disco on its three topmost floors. Drinks were plied from somewhere in the dark and handed out to everyone. Remus found Sirius sitting in a booth with three others holding a beer and looking skittish.

“Oh, thank God.” 

Sirius laughed, “I know. I was thinking, maybe we’ll have to walk back, if I ever found you in here that is. We should go now.”

“What? I don’t want to leave. I just wanted to make sure you weren’t drunk or something.”

 

The next few weeks were caught up in revelry with carefree strangers who bought them drinks and argued with one another. R and S were swallowed up completely by the court of affected twenty-somethings and university students with deep pockets.

Sirius would finish his errands before 7pm and he and Remus would sit on Garba’s stoop with him as he tended to his grill and helped him cut up lettuce and tend to customers. Hauwa would drag them in to see the children and chastise them for being out late.

At night after the house fell asleep, they would leave through the low back gate and walk up to Agodi where either Jamila or Mike would be waiting with others in an idling car. They picked up many other boys and girls this way from as far away as the Molete and Mapo neighbourhoods. The gang would meet at Cocoa House first and then end up at a friend’s party or a live show at the Shrine. 

The camaraderie and ease with which everything was offered pulled up the sword hanging over their heads and strengthened the rope which held it.

 

On a Sunday, Jamila drove up in her Beetle to Garba’s place. She and Sirius exchanged grins and an intricate handshake. He stuck his head through the passenger window.

“Won’t you come down or something? Or you wanna go somewhere?”

She replied, her face clouding for a second, “Well, yeah. There’s no one at my house right now and I’m lonely and I thought, you guys probably weren’t doing anything. Are you busy?”

S shook his head. “Nah, I’ll just get Remus out. Be with you in a second.” He tapped the side of the car and walked back in.

Remus lay on the mattress in the stockroom, fanning himself with a magazine. S remained in the doorway, tracing the rise and fall of Remus’s ribs. R looked up at Sirius, resting on his elbows.

“What?”

“Nothing. You should put on some clothes. Jam is outside, she wants to go out.” S walked off to cover up his embarrassment at being caught staring.

 

Jamila played her Supremes cassette during the drive and took them to her house while R and S conversed between themselves. She led them to the back garden and pool and brought out a carton of records, a turntable and a baggie of rolled joints. They lounged in deck chairs and mats on the patio and smoked while Jamila shuffled through her record collection.

“Now, I know I didn’t ask you have a fondness for hash or any drugs at all but if you do, you can keep abstaining. I won’t force any hands.”

S laughed, “Yeah, that’s not gonna be a problem from my end. I smoked quite a bit back home.” 

They both turned to Remus who was reclining in a pool chair and drinking from a bottle of apple juice.

“Oh, it’s fine. I’ve never tried it but I guess I will now.”

 

Some hours when they were all sufficiently high and were eating pastries Jamila had discovered in the fridge, she said, “So… I uh, actually wanted to ask you guys if you’d come to an art show with me. A friend of mine put some stuff up and I need chaperoning for the event. Unfortunately, I don’t really trust anyone but you guys and Mike to not make it weird and Mike can’t make it ‘cause of classes and things.”

She coughed. “I mean, it’s not that I’d rather have Mike there…”

Remus walked over and handed her a glass of water.

“Hey, we’re really grateful that you thought to hang out with us and introduce to your friends and all that. So we’ll be willing to.”

“We’ll meet some of the guys at a party in Adire later if that makes it okay.” Jamila said.

“It’s not a problem. Why do you need two of us though?”

“I just assumed you were... a package. I’ve never seen either of you alone. And the more the merrier anyway.”

 

The clubs varied in shapes and sizes, the things they all had uncommon were steam, sweat, smoke. The earthen floor would shift its dust like tectonic plates gathering for masses as speakers assembled impromptu. It was like a growing plant, the phenomenon of it, life and decay in a few hours, for some sort of physical release. The industrial fans placed at the corners of the hot rooms only managed to sweep the air to and fro. It did not displace the heat. Mirages like alcohol like nothing before came in view from the metaphysical rearview mirror through which they saw the world.

 

All the same, he slinked across the garden of some collegiate member of the new diaspora who favoured Irish spirits and opiates like his unpleasant colonialist father. He had, maybe through the blindfold of whiskery from Whitehead, been approached by a boy who looked much too young, holding a pipe of poppy seeds burning with a menace. They had laughed a lot and gone into the nearest bathroom, looking at each other through the reflection in the bathroom mirror. Remus was surprised at his attraction to the boy. 

They shared the pipe until ashes sat at the bottom of the pipe’s other end and then his brain was drained into the smallest tube possible and he could feel his heart pound ferociously in his head and neck like he was performing a trepanning on himself (which was quite likely now as he was at a party’s in some second generation Englishman house, as far away as he’d ever been from his real self).

At some point after, he must’ve collected himself, lying under a table in the field outside the house in abject fear and close to tears, he walked up and down the house looking for Sirius. He briefly ran into Jamila who was doing shots in the front room with three guys who carried her on their shoulders. She had wiggled her fingers at him and said, “My God, your pupils are huge.”

He laughed and dodged her flailing arm.

 

S was sitting within his legs crossed on a chaise that was in the hedges of the back gardens around a fire. He didn’t seem to be speaking to the people gathered similarly around the fire and was smoking and humming to himself.

Remus clambered into his lap and clutched his shoulders. “We have to get out of here. I did some opium, I think, with a guy somewhere.” 

R’s shirt was barely hanging off him and he looked debauched.

“Okay. I’ll find Jam.”

“No, no, no,” Remus waved his hands his S’s face “She’s fine, I saw her with some guys. We’ll see her tomorrow. Let’s just go.”

“Alright.” S brushed invisible crumbs from his corduroy trousers.

As they walked back through the house, they were accosted again by Jamila.

“Oh, I am so glad I found you guys! I was calling to you, Remus, didn’t you hear me? I have to introduce you to someone. I know the party’s emptying out now but I really want you to meet this person.”

 

Jamila swayed as she walked, still holding a tumbler of some clear spirit that separated many wavelengths of light on the blue carpet. She was wearing a tight red jumpsuit and flat sandals and S struggled to keep his eyes off her butt. She had moved all her natural hair to the top of her head in a fanciful up-do with braids and barrettes and large flowers. 

S reached out to touch her hair entranced like by the lights and the tree morphing out her head. Jam stopped and spoke in hushed tones to someone standing by a bathroom.

She turned to them and said, “I really wanted to do this less like the way I’m about to do it now but this is only place Ade could show up to.”

She pulled forward a girl wearing round framed glasses and sporting a low cut.

“This is Ade.”

Jam bent to put down her glass by her feet. The girl Ade said to Jamila, “Maybe we should sit down?”

Remus squeezed his clammy hand on S’s elbow, “I don't want to sit down. We really need to leave actually. Jamila, we’ll see you—”

“No, don’t leave yet. I’m trying to be serious. Fuck. I shouldn’t have had those drinks, I guess I forgot.”

Ade sighed and seemed to cringe back into her body.

 

Jamila scrubbed her face violently with her left and took Ade’s with the other.

“So, okay, I figured out that you guys aren’t brothers or cousins or whatever you say you are and that bugged me and I didn't know want to do. I was thinking, maybe you guys were being trafficked or something. So I thought to ask you guys out to see what would happen. I mean, there was a possibility of y’all just not wanting to come out but I would’ve been persistent. But you guys did come and I was relieved because it didn’t seem like you were being held against your will or anything —”

 

R’s hand around S’s elbow tightened and released, “What are you saying?”

Jamila continued without stopping, “And that was cool. So I really thought about it… and I think you guys are on the run. Right?”

Ade said to Jamila, “We shouldn’t be doing this here.”

Jamila turned back to her, “It’s alright, trust me.” She turned back to them. 

“Are you guys on the run? From Kaduna, that is.”

“No.” “Yes.”

S said to Remus, “Yes, we are. We’re in some trouble and are going down to Lagos hopefully.” He looked back at Jamila. “Please don’t turn us over to the police. We didn’t hurt anyone.”

She nodded. “Right, okay, that’s what I thought. And I won’t turn you over. Obviously. You like, have my word on that.”

 

She sounded more and more sober as she went on. “Here’s the thing. I think know why you’re running. And I think it’s something we have in common.”

Ade shook her head, “This is stupid.”

Jamila said, “Ade thinks you guys are going to run away screaming and that I can’t base anything on intuition and we have a bet going. But I have seen you two together —”

“What are you insinuating?” R’s voice went up an octave. S could feel him trembling and his mouth was locked shut.

“You look at each other sometimes like… I knew. It’s familiar. I look at Ade the same way. Since boarding school, I’ve looked at her like that. So I know it when I see it. You act like brothers enough, but it’s way more than that, it is.”

Ade hid her face in Jamila’s shoulder.

 

“There are some of us here in Ibadan, mostly at the university, but I’ve heard rumours of some older folk. But I don’t know of any other people who are settled, together —”

“Who says we’re settled? Or together!” Remus said.

“You’re not denying it, are you? And I know why. It’s because he is standing right next to you and you couldn’t betray him like that.”

“We’re not a couple. And we may not be related but we’re not together. There!”

“Si, do you agree?”

S did a full body shudder. He kept silent.

Ade said to Jamila in the silence, “We should go. You just told them that we’re lesbians. I don’t want to get thrown out of here.”

Jamila held S’s stare. “I’ll help you. I want to. I’m in the same boat as you guys, dammit!”

Ade tugged on Jamila’s hand, “Let’s go, come on!”

S said, “Even if we are, you can’t help us.”

“I can, I will, I swear. We just... Ade and I…. we need to not be alone in this.”

“Okay. You’ve already made up your mind about us anyway.”

Remus said, “I’ll kill you when we get back to Garba’s.”

Jamila said to S, “Thanks. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

 

Remus and Sirius walked back on untarred roads with flickering yellow streetlights till they reached the main city thoroughfare and got on a bus home. The streets were still full of light that washed out R’s set jaw in myriad colours. His eyelashes were clumped together and a vein in his temple throbbed. His elbow jutted out in defence on his body angled on the window as he stared at the city. There was a tear in the collar of his shirt.

 

* * *

 

 

Jamila started at Our Lady Fatima’s College for Girls in her fourth year. Her parents had pulled her out of a regular secondary school a few streets from the house and sent her to the Catholic boarding school in Ilorin, a town that seemed like it was five days drive away to “start her on the journey to becoming a successful and formidable woman”. The students at the school were mostly from the Eastern part of the country with oil money parents who owned acres and acres of crude-oil land in the pockets of Shell and Exxon Mobil. The students proved to be mean and unwelcoming to strangers so Jamila struck out against them and the school’s unwritten rules of conduct and uniformity. 

After all the disciplinary methods (caning, solitary, kitchen duty, suspension and time with the Sierra Leonean nuns) had been meted out on her, Ade joined her class in the fifth year. 

Ade was the youngest in the class; small, incredibly soft-spoken and very solitary. Like corruptible things, like waves crashing, they’d sought each other out in the tentative way of lonely young girls, with fashion advice and cooing over cute white boys in the American movies seniors would sneak into the dorms for Saturday night secret showings. 

They fought very often but usually made up on the same day. It did not take long before the girls started to call them names and say, “Jam is the boy and Ade is the girl and they kiss each other.” Jam will climb on the backs of the girls and bite them, only to get a beating for it.

The nuns and teachers too noticed their closeness and expressed their worries to both Jamila and Ade’s parents. They were allowed to enforce a “separation”.

The house-mistresses put them in separate dorms the next year and they were assigned to different classes and societies and given different house chores. Ade was made a prefect in the same year and given many duties outside dorm hours.

 

“I haven’t seen you in two weeks, except when I walked past you in the library last Friday.” Ade sent a note to Jamila during lunch break through a junior student. “Can we meet on the track field during cram hour tomorrow?” There was a YES and NO column under the question. Jamila looked at the small doe-eyed girl standing by her chair obediently.

 

“Where was Ade when she gave this to you?”

“She was by the chemistry lab.”

“Right. Do you have a pen?”

“Yes. She said to take one with me in case you didn’t have one.”

Jamila laughed. “Okay. Thank you.” 

 

* * *

 

 

Jamila showed up at Garba’s shop a few days later. Sirius was out and Remus sat under the awning of the small store idly listening to the radio and eating strawberry yogurt. 

“Hey.”Jamila stood on the ledge in front of the shop; her face was hidden in shadow by the awning and her hands were in her pockets. “Listen, I’m sorry about what happened at the party. I was drunk and I shouldn’t have come at you guys like that. At you especially.”

“Mmm...”, Remus said around his plastic spoon. He patted the space next to him on the wooden bench.

“Thank you.” Jamila looked around the shop. “Where’s Si?”

“He’s out somewhere.”

“Are you guys doing okay?”

“Yeah, mostly.” Remus stretched his arms above his head. “We haven’t really been talking though since that night.”

“Is it because of me and what I said? I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s just that… we’ve never actually talked about what we’re doing... or what we are.” Remus sighed and pulled at the hem of his shorts. “I need to patch this up.”

Jamila looked at his shorts. She put her hand on Remus’s as he fiddled with the hole in the hem.

“I have no idea of the things you and Sirius have been through. But I know that it means much more than it seems to right now. You’re both doing a great thing, for yourselves. Not too many people actually chase down their happiness.”

Remus chuckled, “Ah, well, it’s more like we had to run for our lives.” He looked at Jamila. “I’m happy about you and Ade. We’ve never met any couples. I thought we were the only ones in the whole country.”

 

Jamila stayed the afternoon and she and Remus exchanged anecdotes about their loved ones and their family homes. She fell asleep with her head in his lap and they dozed off together until Sirius got back. They walked off into the evening and ate corn and beef jerky and lolled around laughing.

For the remaining days of the week, she brought over ordinance maps and excitement and ideas on how and where they could escape to. After Sirius returned from his deliveries, they would hunch over on the bench and mostly laugh at each other’s preposterous ideas. But it was silently decided that Remus and Sirius would leave and that they would leave soon.

 

* * *

 

On Farida Turaki street, one of the popular fabric sellers died in a motor accident. He was a Yoruba man unlike the majority of the population of Sabo but he was well liked so Garba and his family went to pay their condolences.

The large family could be heard wailing long into the night with the traditional mourners accompanying them through the area and into the civil seat of Oyo, in Mapo. Remus stood in the doorway of Garba’s shop as the Ifa priest walked past with his staff and his attendants to the deceased’s house. 

Garba pushed past him, “Hauwa and I are going to be with the family while the priest divines what he really died of. I suspect some of the traders on that street, especially Jibola.” Hauwa nods behind him. Garba continued, “He’s always had it out for Yusuf. I would not be surprised if he’s somewhere involved in his death.”

He paused while putting on his sandals. “Will you come with us? It’s better if there’s no one at home. At least we can lock up. Sirius won’t be back for a while anyway, there’ll be a lot of traffic coming in from Ife.”

 

The masquerades and the mourners had gathered in the front of the house’s compound by the time Garba, Hauwa and Remus got to the house. The _Egungun_ masquerade was twirling and scaring the children standing in the circle around him as he performed. Remus stood on the outer rims and he could feel all his blood rush rapidly through him, through his head and his neck as chest grew hot and his fingers, cold and stiff.

 

* * *

 

bone white cool stones in a river. the smell of snails frying and shea butter on an embalmed, enthroned body. a blue mantle and a golden rod lay by my left foot and an army of death by my right foot.

the masked man cries out for the deceased at night and i follow him into carpeted forest on golden slipper. i follow him into the unseen world of broken potsherds and lift one to my head. i hit the front of my head with this potsherd in this empty place and the man is far off from me. i hit my head until i can eat through the pain like a missile, or like velvet and like the dilation of my pupils and like the tendons of a quivering, dying doe.

as my eyes close, i see a leopard, a serpent, a fish, a tortoise in circles as they are the same. i see the apa tree and i see the two white half cut calabashes beneath it. i see the stream running between them and i see them break and there is a fallen branch by the calabashes. the man holding the branch has four heads that watch the four points of the compass. he becomes a venomous serpent and he hisses at me. i stay rigid as he slithers towards me and bites my ankle.

as i wake, the masked man’s arms are around me. his cloth of many fabrics, of many patterns and hidden shelves and pockets and his wooden face stuck in eternal sorrow. 

he holds me and says, “as grass cannot grow in the sky, so the dead cannot look out of the grave into the street.”

 

 

Remus lay convulsing in a heap as Hauwa screamed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter took much longer than I'd planned for because of a trip in March. I'm glad I've finished it and I'm excited to put up the next one.  
> I am indebted to flourescentgrey for her support and editor's eye but most especially for her tremendous writing skill.  
> A brief glossary: Egungun - ancestral spirit, apa - mahogany.  
> I loved doing research for this and I'd like to share some notes on Yoruba ancestry and religion if anyone reading this cares for the esoteric. Hit me up on tumblr @ forestgospel for strange PDFs.
> 
> This chapter is a huge, soppy ode to Ibadan, my rainy hometown.


	5. winnowing fan

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sirius, on tradition, fathers and growth.

“Anyway, it is sheer foolishness to expect your parents to take you even a little seriously seeing as you yourself have no idea, no ideology to your violence. You’re like an unsharpened tool.”

 

Sirius’s face heated further under the sharp gaze of his uncle.

They were sitting not too far from the falls in remote Minna, a small town that was only a commune two decades ago until the Sokoto Caliphate was set up and the small village was absorbed under the vast emirate. 

His parents never failed to remind him of this; they very nearly named him Uthman after Uthman dan Fodio, the Islamic scholar-warrior who overthrew the earlier narcissistic rulers and set up the Caliphate, a new set of narcissistic rulers.

His father, Omar, would pace his study while he and Regulus sat in the velvet love-seat as Omar lectured them on the important role the Shehu played in their lives.

“You should never forget where you come from. You, your blood, are part of a very distinguished lineage which Allah has destined you to be born into. All the wealth you see, the clothes you’re wearing; they are all brought out of the Shah’s intelligence and generosity towards us.”

 

Ali sat on a wicker chair on a rocky outcropping with the day’s newspaper on his lap. He was wearing cream linen trousers and a blue cotton shirt from England and brown leather sandals custom made for him by his personal craftsman in the town-village.

Sirius sat very still staring at the patterns made by weathering and fossils in the rock, listening to the sounds of the nearby falls until his vision and hearing grew fuzzy. 

His uncle had sent for him at the beginning of his summer vacation, sending him a lengthy letter while he was still studying for his final exams. He’d gone directly from the school on the day of gradation to the Minna house and had not yet heard from his parents.

He and his uncle had a complex relationship that S himself had not been able to untangle. Ali always seemed more like the father figure in his life since he rarely saw or spoke to his father. When Ali visited either Kano or Sokoto, S would be overjoyed to see Ali who he secretly thought was his ‘real’ father. This was a thought he had only ever shared with his younger brother under cover of darkness after sneaking sweets from the kitchen one night.

Ali handled him with two different faces; the strict professor and the doting parent-confidant, which confused S, especially when the two faces would be employed within the same moment.

 

Now, he was at Ali’s house where Ali lived alone with his groundskeeper/research assistant away from the new university in Kaduna where he worked as the chancellor and professor of natural sciences. His research assistant was a fair-skinned Chadian left over from the old empire days when slavery of non-Muslims and immigrants was rife. Hamza was a taciturn twenty-four year old who Ali rescued from slave masters when Hamza was a boy of eleven years. 

S rarely spoke to Hamza who spent most of his time in Ali’s study surrounded by piles of books or in his apartment that was cut off from the main house but still on the grounds. 

S felt a jealousy towards Hamza and Ali’s close relationship. If Ali was not sitting outside with S by the roaming cattle and the falls, he was cooped up day and night with Hamza in the large study or in the laboratory and S wouldn’t see either of them for days at times.

Sometimes, Ali would opt to invite Hamza instead of S to his conferences with the former professor of natural sciences, an Englishman, Dr. Clapperton, who still lived in the area with his family, and this hurt S very deeply from a young age. But when he was invited along to these strange and day-long meetings, he would skip through Dr. Clapperton’s fields and follow the two men around as they walked through greenhouses in overalls and pointed and laughed, speaking in indecipherable Latin terms about flora and experiments.

 

Ali was smoking a Rothmans cigarette and the smoke fanned about his head. He spat to the side and continued.

“Now, I understand your frustration with your parents’ inclinations and though you may not fully grasp their prejudices, you have shown a commendable bravery in standing against them. However, young man, it only appears juvenile to them. You also need to be equipped with the…. jargon their minds understand.”

S remained quiet and forced his concentration to his uncle’s words.

Ali touched his shoulder. “I love you very much. I think of you as my heir. I also love your brother but I’ve always sensed that we don’t have quite the same affinity as you and I do.”

Sirius clenched his insides at the mention of Regulus. This was a point of contention for him. Ali constantly dismissed Regulus as naive or gullible and S struggled with his loyalty to his sibling and his loyalty to his dearest uncle.

S said in defence of Regulus, “If only you would speak with him as well, I am sure that he feels the same way we do. They treat him just as bad.”

“Hm, I’m sure it seems that way to you. Only time will tell.”

S looked back at the whirling pattern in the weathered rock and nodded.

Ali finished reading the paper and tapped S on the shoulder again.

“Come on. We should go back in for lunch. Hamza and I still have some reports to finish.”

“Yes, sir.” 

Ali began to deftly descend the rock and S followed behind, carrying the wicker chair in his arms.

 

*

 

Sirius was seven when he first visited to the Minna house. Ali had acquired some land to the eastern side of the falls around the time S had been born. Ali had been appointed assistant professor of natural sciences to the new university by the outpost of the Crown established in the area and the new job came with many perks including influence over some of the indigenous land owners. It had taken some arm-twisting but he eventually bought the land title at a large bargain and began building the main house just as his vibrant lectures gained popularity amongst the small student population.

When S first visited the Minna house, he came with his mother, Nabila. He was a boisterous seven year old and the large grounds with its cattle and the three horses and endless lush gardens of exotic flora excited him to no end. What enraptured his mind the most though, was the attention his uncle paid him. Nabila spent most of her time indoors, sleeping and resting, happy to be away from the hectic palace life and left Sirius in his uncle’s care.

Then, Hamza had not yet permanently moved onto the grounds, so Ali’s time went undivided. Ali sometimes took him along to lectures and he would sit in Ali’s office for hours, leafing through the large tomes of illustrations of dissected frogs and birds, painted in lustrous watercolour. Ali would peer in every few hours, his arms laden with biscuits and juice and yogurt. Ali spent his lunch breaks coercing S into doing small math calculations he’d copied out with his special fountain pen onto crisp lined paper.

 

Sirius would rush through the sums gladly and Ali would cheer and praise him and the attention, the love filled his head and his heart to unbelievable proportions. After those two months, when he and his mother were to return to Kano, S cried the whole day and to placate him, Ali took him out to the falls for the first time and they sat in each other’s company till dusk.

Since then, his loyalty to his parents diminished and transferred to his uncle who sent him letters regularly. These letters were addressed to him personally and were written in his uncle’s cursive hand and always included a drawing of a flower or a beetle. The only person in the Kano palace he cared for was Regulus.

He would say to himself, “I only love Regulus and Ali and when the time comes, we will all be together.”

 

The Minna house and grounds were extremely beautiful most especially in the rainy season, in June. The house sat amongst jutting rocks on pastureland in the middle of a forest that enclosed the green on three sides with a dirt road at the east that led to the falls. The falls could be heard from almost everywhere on the grounds. The greenhouses and the lab sat on a lower plane on the southeastern side of the house in a cluster while the stables and cattle grazing patch sat on the opposite end. Hamza’s small shack was on the northwestern side of the house and there were paths joining all the different points on the compound. 

The main house was an eclectic marriage of colonial and traditional architecture. It was mostly one storey except for two wings which had an extra floor. There were several open courtyards and terraces branching towards the falls like arms outstretched, “like lovers’ arms”, Ali once jokingly said to S. Ali filled the many rooms with bounty from his travels to other African countries. There were Bantu masks and Ghanaian mats hanging off the walls most rooms, alabaster vases from Tunisia dotted around mantles and side tables and there were many exotic aloes set in the leafy arches of the courtyards. 

 

S’s room was one of the largest ones. The room had its own terrace that faced the south and the river water from the falls tumbled into. Ali hung a large portrait of Frederick Lugard, the general responsible for the amalgamation of the Nigerian protectorates, in his regalia, in S’s room as well as two large chests he’d used to cart away his work after finishing at Oxford. There were bookcases filled to the brim with botanical books in Latin which S could not read but he leafed through them when Hamza and Ali were in the greenhouse for too long. A large bed sat in a corner and a prized wooden desk with lion heads carved on its legs and a single cushioned chair sat by the opposite wall.

S was very proud of his room and even when he was left to his devices in the house, he always returned to the room, just to be in it. His own room.

 

When the Minna house was completed a year and a half later, Sirius was invited again, this time with his younger brother. Hamza was also moving in and Ali had begun to take on more classes from Dr. Clapperton. Ali had also received a large grant from the Crown to further his research on indigenous crop production and soil type in the area surrounding the Niger River. Ali officially employed Hamza as his assistant and they spent a lot of time together on a part of the grounds that had never been off-limits to Sirius before; the group of greenhouses and laboratories that hugged the eastern boundary of Ali’s land.

S was sullen and acted out on his aggression onto his smaller brother, alienating both of the people most important to him in one shot. He spent most of his time wandering the grounds and leaving Regulus scared and alone in the stables till it was dark then Hamza would come to fetch him holding a flashlight in one hand and a crying Regulus in his other. Hamza never scolded him and simply requested they go back in for dinner. Ali did not acknowledge S’s change in temperament either and treated him just the same which only added to his anger.

 

As Sirius grew older and began boarding school, he drew away further from both his brother and Ali, retreating into himself, and refused to return home except for the long vacation at the end of the school year. Even then, he only spoke when spoken to and he frequently skipped his Koranic lessons and snuck out of the house on foot. He would use his allowance to take a bus into the city and go to the city square only to return after dinner. At that point, his mother relinquished hold over him so he spent these long months alone and unsupervised.

Regulus however stayed loyal to his brother and sometimes sat with him in his room after the house-wide curfew. Regulus would leave his bedroom and go to his brother’s after all the lights had been turned off. They said little to each other but it strengthened S’s bond with Regulus nonetheless.

The invitations to the Minna house trickled to nothing after they went unanswered the first few years until an assignment brought Ali to Kano. He visited the family though Omar refused to see him and before he left, he spoke to S in private to convey his sadness at the unanswered letters.

 

“Your favourite horse, you know, Ophelia, she’s had a baby and I really wish you’d been there to see it. The grounds have really changed, Sirius. Even more beautiful than before.”

S stood with his arms crossed not looking at Ali’s face, staring into the distance by his shoulder.

“I don’t know why you’re upset with me. Will you tell me?”

S’s frown deepened.

Ali sighed and fondly rubbed S’s cropped hair.

“I can’t believe how tall you are. How old are you now? What, twelve? You’re already very handsome…. You look just like your mother.”

After a pause, Ali took out a parcel from his shoulder bag. “Here. This is for you. Very rare creature, local to the area around the house… Hamza would be angry that I’ve given this to you.”

It was wrapped in brown paper and as long as his forearm. S took it from Ali.

“Well, I hope you like it. It will remind you of me and of the home waiting for you.”

S looked up at his uncle. Ali smiled at him.

 

Later that night, Regulus and S unwrapped the parcel. In a heavy glass case with a wooden bottom was a butterfly trapped in amber.

 

*

Straight after Sirius threw up his cap, he found the driver waiting for him at the edges of the hall. He received a letter from Ali weeks before, requesting that he come to the Minna house. 

> ‘Your parents have agreed to let me see you first, of course.
> 
> This is a very important time for you. Your father has managed to get you admission into a very prestigious university in England at my suggestion. I feel it pertinent that we see each other and discuss your future before this monumental shift, my dear boy.
> 
> I will send Farouk to get you. I may not be at the house when you arrive but Hamza will be there to set up your room.’
> 
> Your loving uncle, Ali.’

 

For most of the first month S spent in the Minna house after his final year, Ali and Hamza received shipments of strange fleshy succulents S had to unpack carefully while wearing huge leather gloves into a tin wagon attached to a rickety skeletal bicycle. He would drop off the bugling burlap sack or crates of New World cacti on top of the wooden workbenches. Ali would wave him away and Hamza would immediately begin prodding the plants and writing notes and drawing out sap with small metal pipes to smear on glass slides. And if he wasn’t knee deep in soil outside trying to care for some bougainvillea Ali had entrusted to him, he was sitting on the hot rocks by the falls, singing to himself and attempting to melt into his surroundings.

The letter he’d been dreading came in after this month of relative calm. 

Ali returned from Kaduna and solemnly placed the letter by his head where S was lying on the couch staring at the ceiling of the study.

“This came in for you… I hadn’t checked the post in a while actually… it’s from your parents, Sirius.”

Ali sat with a humph on the armchair close by. Sirius shifted to lie on his side and the letter slid to the floor.

“If you could fetch some glasses and rum for us…” 

S went to the cabinet at the back of the study and took out two tumblers and the decanter of rum Ali kept on the mantle. Ali poured out the rum and toasted to their health. S sat up and stared at the yellow orange liquid as it separated white light rays into rainbow colours that splashed on the brown carpet till he downed the alcohol in the glass.

“Well, that’s one way to do it.” Ali chuckled and then he sighed. “I suppose they want you back at the house. We haven’t even gotten the chance to really talk. I’m sorry I’ve been so swamped with work…” Ali scrubbed his face with his other hand.

“You should read it now instead of later. It’ll burn a hole in your head if you don’t.”

S reached for the envelope on the floor. The paper felt weighty and textured. He flicked his thumb under the lapel and broke the small seal.

Ali motioned to leave and Sirius said, “No, please stay.” Ali nodded.

 

Sirius read out the letter to Ali. His mother was asking him to return for the Durbar festival.

“Have you ever done it?” S asked Ali. Ali had poured out another round of rum for both of them.

“Hm, yes. I was a bit younger than you though, when I did it for the first time. In those days, the Durbar was just a royal procession of the guards and my cousins were way more invested in it than I was. You see, I was in line for the emirate because I was your grandmother’s only son and she being the first wife… frankly, I’d already made up my mind about the whole situation. So your other uncles, you know Umar and Kabir… those guys were very excited. Anyway… I guess you, Regulus and the rest are going to be participating.”

“I’ve never ridden for the Durbar before.” S mulled more to himself than Ali. He picked at the threads of the cushion by his side.

S looked back up at Ali. “What should I do? I don’t want that life either. I’d rather stay here with you.”

Ali shook his head. “No. You need to go to them. It’s important, I think, that you at least see your mother…” Ali sighed again. “I can’t imagine what you think of me, of them, of this life that you have.”

“I’ve made some decisions, since I came here.” S stated with a finality.

“Will you share them with me? I can be good counsel.”

“Yes, well, I would like to pursue Oxford, like you did and I know that I can’t be the way my parents want me to be. I’m not their son really, except in name. And maybe with time, differences will ease.”

“Will you go to the Durbar though?”

“Yes. I’ll need to speak to Regulus and to my parents, before I leave.”

S dropped his head into his palm and crossed his legs under himself.

Ali stood and pulled S into a hug. He let go and patted his head.

“I’ll be as much help as I can. After all, it seems we’re the black sheep in the family.”

 

Over the next few days, Ali dropped his research and he and Sirius hiked through the neighbouring forest in the mornings. They ate packed lunches of chicken sandwiches and beef jerky before they turned back towards the house. Ali and S would part ways to their rooms to nap until Ali woke S for tea in his study where Ali either lectured him on British political history or divulged tall tales of his time at university.

S packed slowly and methodically, developing a kleptomaniac need to pocket small trinkets he found around the house. He packed away beaten paperback plays he found in the study he was sure no one would miss, a small bag with five oddly-shaped pearls in it and a leather notebook that was dated back to Ali’s travels through North Africa.

On the day of his departure, Ali and Hamza walked him down the hill while Farouk carried his suitcase ahead and then they stood by the roadside, waving as the car drove off. 

It had been ten months since Sirius had seen either his parents, or Regulus.

 

The palace was in full prep mode. Half of the maidservants were walking from room to room, changing bedsheets and the other half were ensconced in the kitchens, chopping garlic, onions, frying up plantains and black beans and airy cassava flour cakes.

Regulus came into his room just as S began unpacking.

“I heard that you’ve been with Uncle Ali for weeks.” Regulus sneered. He was still wearing his prayer garb. It was early afternoon, he must’ve just come from the mosque.

“You’re taller.” S ignored Regulus’ comment.

“You’re still part of this _family_.” He retorted.

S sat heavily on the ottoman. “Not really though. And I haven’t been, not for a long time.”

“Father’s furious.”

“When isn’t he furious?”

“You can’t just abandon everybody because you feel bad or tricked or something!”

S turned to his brother, who stood fuming with his arms tightly crossed. He **was** taller.

“I’m not abandoning you.”

“Are we not good enough? Am I not good enough?”

“Reg, this isn’t about you—“

“It’s about me because it’s about this family. You chose not to contact me. You made that decision.” Regulus had stepped in-between S’s legs and was now glaring at S. Regulus scowled and his face turned so sour.

He said, incensed, “We have a responsibility to the people of Kano in two weeks. Whatever grudge it is you have with the family and with our father, you best drop it. You’re no longer in dearest Ali’s arms, this is real life.”

Regulus walked to the door. “And Nabila wants to see you. She’s in her parlour. Do not upset her.”

The door slammed.

 

It appeared to S that much had changed over his ten month absence. When he went to see Nabila, she did not bring up his father or his failure to respond to her letters while he was at school. She only mentioned the Durbar once, asking him to see the tailor the next day for measurements. No questions asked. He simply nodded and walked back out. 

Over dinner, Regulus shot dark looks at him and threw around remarks on the fragile state of the public following a fanatical sect’s series of attacks on some mosques in the Sabo neighbourhood. 

“You know, I personally think it serves them right. Obviously those mosques were preaching some adulterated version of the holy book.”

He also made comments about Ali’s sexuality.

“We all know why he hasn’t remarried yet. That bullshit story about the English woman he was with, is just a cover for something much more insidious. And I mean, that Hamza or whoever, that he keeps around? It’s revolting! He’s parading it in our faces and Allah’s face.” Regulus laughed and turned to S. 

“What can you tell us about the nature of their relationship?”

Nabila hit the table. “That’s your uncle, my brother, you are talking about in such a derogatory manner!”

Regulus turned to her. “You haven’t seen him in years! He abandoned the crown, the people and he left you alone with your fat and spiteful sisters!”

Nabila stood up, her chair made a sharp sound on the tiled floor and left the table.

S said to Regulus picking carefully at the greens on his plate, “I guess you’ve been studying at our father’s knee, eh? She only does that when Omar is around.”

Regulus said nothing. He huffed and called for his plate to be taken away and walked back towards the stairs.

 

In truth, the allegations that Regulus spoke of had never crossed S’s mind but now, he found himself going over details he mentioned and cringed in fear. 

He knew his own secret, a blurred reflection unclear in details but a general certainty about the height and breadth of the thing. It was something he took out of his mind and often looked at like a caged exotic bird and then put back on a high shelf he could not reach except by exerting much mental force. He knew what it said in the Koran; Omar had made it very clear to him what acts were abominable before Allah. S knew that even the Christian God agreed with this. S wasn’t sure what he wanted but he knew for certain that he looked at other boys, sweating as they ran alongside on the track at school, with heat in his belly.

He tossed again on the bed. Why did he enjoy making himself uncomfortable? He was defiling his God, his father and the palace. How did his younger brother age twenty years in span of ten months? (This change has been going on for much longer and you know it)a small voice at the back of his head replied laughingly. Was it this fault for not shielding him from the world’s blows? 

Doubt and guilt ate at him for the rest of the night. He slept fitfully as his head ached.

 

He obediently went to the tailor’s the next morning. He skipped breakfast later, not quite ready to face his mother or brother while he was shaken and overwrought. It would worry his mother and probably gladden Regulus. He spent the next few days avoiding the rest of the house, asking one of the housekeepers to bring his food up after the meal ended. 

S felt like a coward, remembering Ali’s insistence that he not back down. The days passed quietly. He only left his room when his mother called for him.

He scrawled vengeful letters to members of his family that were actually mostly unsent letters to Regulus who was only a room away.

 

> I have yet to understand the kind of charcoal and tar mixture Omar poured into your ears and down your throat. Did they hold you over a fire until you charred up like the road? Have they stepped on your back and forced you to renounce your very self? 
> 
> Your mouth is filthy and filled with food now, you have become the man that we both feared, despised and hated and I am brimming over with guilt. It may be my own victim complex or inability to process anything that is our lives or reality. 
> 
> Maybe if I had held shut the womb of our mother so that you could not come out… This has happened because of his evil, fatalistic blood.
> 
> Where did your childhood go? Are you not fifteen anymore? Will you climb in my bed and finally welcome me with warmth?
> 
> I am not abandoning you, you are the one who has abandoned me with venomous arrows that are your lips.
> 
> I curse this land and this house and the man who claims to be our father. I curse him.
> 
> I will not leave you in here to rot like an abscess.
> 
>  
> 
> Your dearest brother,
> 
> S.M.B.

 

*

 

In his third year during the long vacation he was home, S skipped the holy Juma’at prayer for a month. His mother threatened him after he failed to show up the mosque in the compound the first Friday afternoon. The second time, she pleaded with him. She called him into her private salon and petted his hair, asking him to stop upsetting her and causing her grief, that the other members of the family were noticing his absences. He remained mute all the while she spoke to him in this soft begging voice. 

After that month, his father returned from Sokoto, attending a meeting with the emirs of the region. His father found out that S had been skipping his prayers. Omar stormed into S’s room the next morning and calmly grabbed S by the arm. He hustled a clawing, biting S into a waiting car by the gates. They were driven to the city’s main court, a Shari’a court that upheld the local ruling of law according to the Koran in Kano.

A man was being sentenced to a whipping. He had been offered the option of a fine but it was accessed that the man was too poor to pay the fine within the period he needed to come up with the money. 

The man’s wife and two children were also in the courtroom pleading and weeping. None of them spoke Hausa because they were indigenous Nupe people whose land had been handed over to the ruling class at the time of establishment of the caliphate. The unnamed man had robbed a merchant of a large sum of money and goods. S and Omar sat on the overhead balcony in the court as the bailiff whipped him. 

S sat scared stiff clutching his knees as the man was lashed forty times. The empty courtroom echoed with his screams muffled by the cloth he bit down on while he lay prostrate on a wooden table with his wrists and ankles tied down.

S did not realise that his face was wet till he felt drops on his knee.

 

Afterwards, the man was taken away by two policemen. Omar pulled S up by the arm and they left the courthouse. During the ride back to the palace, Omar conversed with the driver and guard who had accompanied them while S looked out the window, trying to understand the weight that had settled in his stomach. Was it a threat? Would his father really hand him over to those horrible bailiffs for a whipping?

At the house, Omar left S standing in the front hall and retreated to his study without a word. S went to see Regulus who was at a Koran recitation at the mosque, seeking some companionship.

Regulus was walking up the stars when S caught him, still in his white kaftan and cap.

“Oh, I didn’t see you at breakfast. You said you’d be at my recitation, Sirius.” Regulus fell into step with his brother as they both walked back towards the bedrooms.

S shook his head. 

 

Once they were in the relative safety of Regulus’ bedroom, S rambled and paced up and down the floor.

“I’m telling you, Reg, our so called father is coming after me. I can sense it.” He turned to face Regulus who sat in the middle of his four-poster. “I need you with me on this. We will escape to Uncle’s house in Minna together… we just need a plan, some code we can use without calling attention to ourselves.”

“You want to leave Kano? And Ma?” Regulus shook his head. “There’s no way we’d even get away with it.”

“Yes, we would! If I can just tell Ali the right thing, he’ll send someone to collect us!”

“… I don’t know if I’m ready to leave the palace… and to leave Ma behind. And Minna is so far away!”

S stopped pacing and went to sit with Regulus on the bed.

“I won’t be able to leave you here with him. He doesn’t love us.”

Regulus looked away from his brother’s imploring face. 

S continued, “I can’t leave you here.”

 

*

“You’re just a little bitch, a little faggot.”

Sirius crouched on the ground in the middle of the football pitch, blood dripping from a cut on his left eyebrow. Fred, a senior at the school, stood before him, his knuckles shiny and red.

Dust was collecting on his white gym shorts and S began to experience gaps in his consciousness just as another blow landed on his chin. The senior pulled him up by the ear and the handful of boys gathered around the scene, protecting the fight, that blissful image of masculinity as its bestworst from any authority’s eyes, laughed. 

S pushed himself off Fred’s arm and stumbled away from him. At that distance, he ran back and swung his arm around to land somewhere between Fred’s clavicle and neck. The recoil sent pain through S’s arm but the blow seemed to land. Taking the moment of surprise, he kicked Fred’s shin as he crouched down holding his neck and howling.

The boys who had come with Fred immediately ran for Sirius as he reeled forward, clutching his ankle every few steps, trying to reach the gate separating the complex from the rest of the school grounds.

Fred had it in for Sirius since he joined the school two years after S enrolled. He was a year above S and had taken a special dislike to S for reasons like, “I’ve seen him staring at my ass a lot during the matches” and “he acts stupid”.

Fred and his gang of henchmen skulked around bothering everyone but really hammered down on Sirius during term time with techniques ranging from a juvenile pulling-down-of-underwearl to full-fledged beatings. Sirius did not report to anyone, not even Ali.

As he got to the gate and ran back to the dorms, he felt just as cavernous as the open mouth of the illuminated tennis courts in the distance, forced open by his own hands and his entrails scattered on the plastic of a basketball court (squeak squeak, the players follow the ball smearing red from his body while he sits in the bleachers cheering them on)

What did ‘faggot’ really mean? Did he really stare at Fred’s (body clenched tight like the before sounds of a motorcycle) ass?

(the players keep playing as tall lean glistening boys with long fingers gather)

 

*

Omar returned to Kano while S and Regulus were fist fighting in the kitchen. He took them both by the collars of their shirts and left them in his study for hours, watched over by a guard. They shouted at each other and nearly came to blows again but were separated by the guard. 

When Omar came in, it was past dinner. He dismissed Regulus and then ate his dinner while S watched him from the old velvet love-seat while S cupped a hand over his swollen left eye.

“ _How is Ali?_ ”, Omar said from behind his napkin. A maidservant came to take away the plate.

S was stricken rigid by the soft tone of voice and by the sideways question Omar asked. 

S once eavesdropped on Omar saying some terrible words about Ali, “pig-headed nobody who deserves the wrath of Allah”.

“ _Um, he’s fine, sir_.” He grit his teeth at the slam of the door as Omar waved away the guard standing by.

Omar stood and walked to the window. The small lights outside in the garden shone through the glass on his face.

“Is he still fiddling with grass and that boy he keeps around?” Omar said looking out of the window, switching to an British-accented English.

S’s jaw clenched. Stand your ground, do not back down, do not be cowed, do not be intimidated.

“He is doing important work with Hamza, he has been contributing valuable research to the university and to the farming public of this country, **sir.** ” S let the honorific ‘sir’ draw itself out until it sounded as bitter as he left.

Omar laughed and turned to face S.

“You sound like him, you know. Well, something has to be done about you, right?” Omar walked back to his desk. “Stand up.”

S stood.

“You’re a disgrace to this family. You’ve done nothing to bring glory to this family, failing to participate in Islamic activities at school, fighting your schoolmates and getting suspended, not t talk of hanging from your uncle’s apron like a child —“

S stood up. “I am not afraid of you, I will not let you demean me, like you demean everyone in this family.”

“How dare you interrupt me?!” Omar’s scream echoed loudly around the study.

He circled back to where S was. Omar pulled on S’s hair so that his eyes were looking up at his face.

“I don’t want you in this house come September. You will be given a monthly stipend and accommodation during your schooling in return for your silence. Whatever you do afterwards is left to you. You will not contact your mother or brother even if they send word to you. You will never return to this house in your probably short life, seeing as you are of the same kind as your filthy kaffir uncle.”

S spat in Omar’s face. 

Omar let go of his hair and hit him. S recoiled from the force of the hit. It was not the first time his father had hit him. His face throbbed.

Omar walked back to his chair and picked up the folded newspaper and put on his reading glasses.

“You can go.” He said without looking up from the paper.

 

*

 

It felt like the hours before a heavy rain. Everyone pointing at the gathering clouds, shivering old women clutching their shawls tighter at the increasingly cold wind. Housewives taking white sheets off washing lines and children staring out of windows longingly. The spiritual rumbling of clouds running into each other. 

It felt like anticipation in S’s chest, like he was holding his breath; had held it for too long and still continued. 

He didn’t speak much to Regulus afterwards. He didn’t speak to anyone afterwards. He spent much of his time in the stables under the guise of preparing for the Durbar. He sometimes snuck off to town and wandered around the markets. He would eat sweet masa with honey and cookies of baked coconut pieces. As the stalls closed up around seven in the evening, he would walk out of the main city centre till he could get a taxi to the very outskirts where the palace was. He would then walk the rest of the way in the dark, accompanied by lone flickering streetlights, dousing his skin in lithium yellow. Skeletal cattle herds of about twenty head would slowly march past like some hellish apparition with their herdsman who was usually some young boy around Sirius’s age with a long stick he used to direct the cattle. The boys looked like fashioned something out of the trash heaps adorning the city; strips of black plastic bags and rips and holes like open mouths in seemingly specific positions on frayed denim and t-shirts with slogans like “GO TO THE BAHAMAS AND EXPERIENCE LOVE!” “COCA COLA: REFRESH YOUR GUESTS”.

 

 

At Fajr on the day of the Durbar, Sirius sluggishly woke and put on his slippers and jalabia. He reached the courtyard the mosque sat in and he spied Regulus in the still pre-dawn light blue perform abolition. S stared at him as Regulus washed behind his ears and said a confession prayer into his wet palms and wiped them over his head. S walked to him, as if pulled by the magnet of nostalgia. How many times had he seen this very image; it was as if it was branded behind his eyelids with hot coals. 

S dropped his Koran by his feet and began to wash at the tiled trough. Regulus looked strained and feverish from the glances S shot to his brother.

Fair was usually only two rakahs long but because it was the day of the Durbar, it was extended to six longer rakahs and a sermon was added. 

The preacher droned on about sacrifices of Prophet Mohammed while Sirius looked about the mosque. He had not been inside it for a few weeks, and he felt like one of the heretics despised by the Muslim majority community in Kano. The candle wax still dripped onto the tiled floor. He could see his mother and some maidservants on the women’s side of the mosque through the ornate screen divider.

The imam was also different. A much younger man probably someone who had just finished from the madrasah in Kaduna under Al-Khalid, but had a good enough name and recommendation to be invited to the palace for the first Durbar prayer. The man would definitely be invited into Omar’s study after for tea spiked with whiskey and lamb and rice. Omar liked to keep the religious scholars and authorities on a short leash.

Omar and Regulus were conversing in low tones, sitting with their heads bent towards each other as Omar gesticulated wildly with one hand and his other hand occupied with his rosary. The Korans’ pages at their feet flittered in the slight breeze coming in from the low windows. Sirius looked back the imam, his stomach knotting up at the sight of them. 

S waited until the mosque emptied at 9am before standing up. His knees felt weak. His face also felt strangely numb and frozen in a grimace. He walked back into the palace, considering a way for him to avoid performing at the Durbar. Something about the morning seemed ominous and choking. Somewhere inside himself, a resolve solidified, a fight brewed. His mind oscillating wildly between a hot fury at Omar’s tight grip and a more solemn, harder-to-pin-down fear that his grip would never loosen, no matter how much he pushed or how far away he was. 

As he entered his room, he lay on his bed and his fear escalated. He realised that his life would be stifled and he would become a husk and lose himself in the sea of ceremony, of pageantry, performance and he was filled with an overwhelming sorrow. 

Tears formed in his eyes.

A voice at his door said, “Please prepare to leave the palace, young master. We are departing in two hours.”

 

He perfunctorily bathed, put on the white tunic, kaftan and tapered silk trousers laid on the sofa. As he stood in the middle of the room wrapping his turban around his head with one hand, he screamed.

It felt like there was something in his eye; but it was as large as a branch of wood and he’d ignored for it for a long time until it moved deeper into his eyeball. Something in the spaces between his breaths. In the smell of frying meat and the sounds of trumpets of the parade that gathered outside the palace gates. Something in the heaviness of the white cloth draped on his shoulders.

He dropped his hand and reached around for the small knife he kept under his bed. It had a intricately carved handle of ivory and the family name in Arabic script embossed in indigo on the top of the handle. He did not remember who had given him the knife, maybe one of his distant uncles.

S lifted the hem of his kaftan to expose his torso. He sliced a gash on the soft part of his belly below his left ribs from somewhere on his left side up to his navel. The razor wire of pain blinded him. The memory of too-hot crab soup and the thorny cactus on Ali’s windowsill. 

He dropped his kaftan back over the slash. It stained the underlining cloth but not his topmost kaftan. The blood dripped onto the waistband of his trousers. He felt it slowly trickle down his leg.

He put on his sandals and left the room.

 

Kano in July was humid, musty and still oppressively hot. The townspeople were in full frenzy with loud music reaching out of open doors and women and children dancing. The town was resplendent with joy and the heat mirages around the heads of people milling around the streets. The town square was very quickly filling. The streets were completely blocked as people lined up in either side of the chosen route to await the royal procession of the guards and the emir’s family.

Black Benzes sat in the main courtyard around the statue of Uthman dan Fodio. Omar stood on one side with Regulus and Nabila and on the three other sides stood the other branches of the family; the men who had also married into Nabila’s family as she and her sisters were in direct lineage to the crown. Terim’s family included his two wives, Aisha and Farida (Nabila’s closest sister in age) and their six collective children of startlingly varying age. The oldest of them was twenty-six years old and engaged to a business mogul’s son and the youngest was merely five years old, tottering around her mother’s skirts and laughing. His two teen twin boys wore identical red and green outfits and a ceremonial sabre at their sides. There was also Jibril with his two wives, Didi, who was Nabila’s eldest sister and Maimuna, with their collective five male children who were closer in age than Terim’s children, aged from sixteen to eight, with two years in-between each of them.

S watched them bicker amongst each other while they were seemingly waiting for him. He remained in the shadows of the house. 

Omar called to a guard standing by and shouted, “Go and find that ungrateful boy right now!”

S ran back inside the house and he threw his sandals off his feet and went down to these servants quarters. He could hear the guard above him walking down the hallways searching the rooms. S tried to move methodically, shushing any remaining people inside the rooms with a glare as he walked quietly down hallways and labyrinthine passages through courtyards.

From the corner he was crouching in, he could see the flash of the guard’s military regalia running past him, questioning the servants inside. He feared that they might give up his position under the man’s questioning so he crawled further down the passage.

His chest heaved up and down as he looked to his left and saw that he was backing a wall. He figured either the guard would find him there or he could take his chances and run to another position. Then he heard approaching footsteps.

 

After a lengthy scuffle with the guard, the man finally managed to wrangle S into submission. S was sporting a split lip and his bleeding side ached as the blood clotted on his cloth and on the gash. The guard asked him about the blood still seeping from his side but he refused to answer and simply held his side with his left hand. A side of his kaftan was now fully stained with red. 

The rest of the palace had already left so he and the guard got into the guard’s personal car and drove to the town square in silence. The guard walked him to the stables where Regulus and their cousins milled around, directing stable boys around on how to properly lace up saddles and talking about the sabres the’d all been given. As S walked in, his face drawn and his side bleeding, conversation stopped abruptly.

S stood in the doorway and spat some blood out of his mouth.

He said, “What the fuck are you all looking at? _Fucking mindless drones_.”

At this one of Terim’s older sons walked up to him and pushed him, “You don’t get to talk to us like that because you were beat up, it’s your own fault for not doing as you’re told.”

“That’s exactly my point —“

Regulus laughed from somewhere in the back. “Don’t bother with him, brothers. It doesn’t matter what he says, beside his mouth is swollen shut.”

At this, the boys snickered and shoved S around as they walked out the stables.

 

—

 

Muhammad Marwa, also known as Maitatsine, a hugely controversial Cameroonian preacher of radical fundamentalism in the Kano, had been in Kano city, building a following of young depraved men living on the streets, rendered destitute by the Nigerian ruling class’ ineptitude in setting up social security for abandoned children disappointed in the current Emir, Muhammed Sanusi, Sirius’s uncle. 

While S had heard whispering of the man’s preaching and the type of revolt he was planning against the palace, moderate Muslims and Christians in the city from Omar’s ajar study door, he (and really, most of the ruling and economic elite) were still very ignorant of the current state of hysteria building up in the lower classes in the city and amongst some members of the religious elite (this group mostly consisted of religious pariahs and apostates).

Months ago, Maitatsine moved his base from the city to an enclave on the fringe of Kano called Yan Awake where he and his followers practised para-military actions in preparation for the impending attack on those who did not follow Maitatsine’s rulings against Western education and media, which included bicycle and watches. The attack was eventually scheduled for the day of the durbar, unknown to anyone outside to the outside community. 

Somewhere in the fever that held the city in time of celebration, was a murky cold anticipation of the attack, news of which had quietly spread to a handful of the public in the previous week. 

The state police presence on the streets was pronounced to this effect. People began to climb on the back of roaming police trucks and the policemen pushed them away by the butts of automatic rifles. In certain streets, small scuffles had broken out. A fire was being put out in the Sabon Gari market.

 

 

 

A news clipping from a two week old edition of ‘The Guardian’ titled: “MAITATSINE: NEW REPORT ON GROWING FORCE IN LOCAL KANO COMMUNITY: Residents complain of gunshot sounds late into the night and hostilities of Yan Awake enclave members.”

Thursday 8 July 1983, page 10 under the “CITY POLITICS” section

 

> “…. One resident, Mr. Yusuf*, has moved his family out of the area, relocating to nearby Maiduguri, to escape the Maitatsine sect.
> 
> “It is really terrible what they are doing there. My wife’s stall got burnt down because they saw her going into her church that afternoon. Two of them, they even followed her home afterwards. They would’ve done worse if she had not met me on the road. Ask other people too! This kind of harassment is uncommon now in what used to be a calm area. People are scared, very scared… those people in Yan Awake will soon take the whole fiasco to a new level.”
> 
> The Yan Awake neighbourhood has been grotesquely transformed into a place of palpable fear. Curfews have introduced by the local government and heavy security forces operating in the area. The call of the muezzin has been silenced, churches and even some moderate mosques have been torched or closed their doors and homes have been boarded up all according to the rulings of the leader of the sect, Muhammad Maitatsine…”

  * > name changed




 

Another clipping from an earlier edition of ‘THISDAY’ titled: “THE POLITICISATION OF RELIGIOUS INSTITUTIONS”

Friday 23 March 1983, on the last page of the paper, under the “Editor’s Letter” section, written by Amina Samadu, assistant politics editor.

 

> “In fact, Alhaji Bajiga Fula, the owner of Fuller Limited known for its semolina products that we are all familiar with, has been spotted several times in his trademark Rolls Royce, driving in the suburban area surrounding the Maitatsine sect’s enclave, Yan Awake. The reported sightings took place at many different dates through the latter half of last year. This is added onto various meetings Governor Rimi had with the Maitatsine head, Muhammad Marwa, in the state house. These were more public meetings of course but at this point, the State Security Service had already begun its investigations into the going-ons of the sect. This incredible oversight, this bedding down of government and religious (and dare I say, ethnic) fundamentalism is frequently ignored by the populace until it is too late. 
> 
> What is the Emir of Kano doing about this? Why will he not wield his tremendous power for good and exile Marwa finally? Marwa has somehow managed to slip through the grasp of our immigration Service and now even the ruler himself?
> 
>  
> 
> I am an educated Hausa Muslim woman. I used to live in Kano but relocated to Lagos to work for THISDAY. My family is still in Kano and I see them often. I refuse to fear for my life because of the incompetence of the ruling class. This horror that wants to divide our newly won peace, our sovereignty (might I remind you that we only sent those old British fools packing forty-odd years ago?) to undermine our nation over century-old doctrine that is easy to twist and morph into weaponry, must be snuffed out…”

 

—

 

Into this hot chaos, hot baked frenzy of disenfranchisement and denial and perceived marginalisation, fear of ‘the geopolitical dominance America is starting to exert’, fear of dissolution and hunger for power. Wielding the faith and lives of others. Into this stew in dry, old, romantic Kano did S walk.

By the time he got on his own horse and steadied it into his position on the procession line, he could feel his strength fading fast, his grip on the reins (both physically and mentally) loosening. The scuffles had grown into fights and grown into stabbings and gunfights as more and more of the sect appeared like ghosts, armed to the teeth and cursing the day with spittle and blood mixed into the red sand; the blood of their brothers and the blood of the infidel.

The screaming rose like a wave, collapsing at the shores of policemen holding the people back from the royal procession. The adoration turned sour and like bodysnatchers, the praising public was replaced by bandits and bloody young men, ready to kill, ready to die.

Horses brayed, spooked and soon the line dissolved and scattered off in many directions, most of the royal entourage riding back towards the palace. The guards amongst them began to fire shots without consideration into the general seething mass of people charging towards them.

S’s horse took off, unbidden by his feeble tugs on the reins. He saw that the horse was riding into the main whirlpool fray of violence and so he threw himself off the horse and ran. He took side streets weaving alongside the market now in flames, running through backyards and crying lost children. His mind fractured as he ran, unable to complete a single thought except the flight instinct pushing past the throb of pain from his side.

He could not continue for very long and soon collapsed on an empty street and made the decision to hide out in a house.

He dragged himself into the nearest house on his left, leaving a trail of blood to bake on the road. The house he entered was not empty, he could hear voices inside from where he lay but he could not find it in him to flee.

S found himself thinking, “If I am found, it’ll either be by the wrong people or by the right people… that is if anyone still holds the palace in favour. It is more likely that I will die from blood loss thankfully.”

His sight blackened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (words in italics are spoken in Hausa and translated to English).
> 
> This was a tenuous topic to write about. Religious and ethnic fundamentalism are a staple of the Nigerian society and has been for a long time. This is in no way meant to be damning or indicative of the Muslim Nigerian community as fundamentalists can be found in all religions and societies in the world.  
> I've got some research from CODESRIA's 'Africa Development' magazine on the weaponisation of youth during the very real Maitatsine riots in Kano if anyone cares for it. 
> 
> As usual, a big basket of thanks to flourescentgrey for beta-ing and for her support through this. And to anyone still reading this, I really appreciate it for I am not the most diligent writer. I can assure you though, that I do love writing this and have plans and outlines on how to finish it. Thank you!


	6. two headed boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus, on grief and cognitive dissonance.

A false god. The sublime fantasy of protection, of womb-like warmth handed out in love, only in exchange for fear. Sitting still on the bed watching dust particles filter in and out of the scene like extras in a play only you can see. Losing feeling in your hands, squeezing a lover’s thigh. 

You wake up and sit still, pondering for a moment the worth of your damned soul. What the devil would offer for it. Cold, hard cash? A daffodil? The ability to know what they’re thinking (all of them)? Looking at the tuft of wool on the carpet that you have seen on your sweater, that you have most definitely seen on the shawl your grandmother wears (if she is real).

Where did it go? 

False gods, deaf and blind and mute. The unachievable. To not know anything, forever isolated.

You wake up and sit still. 

 

Remus wishes he was made of wood from the strong, black _apa_ tree. The tree revered by all, worshipped by hunters, feared by children. Fairies bury their gold in the soil covered by the leaves of the _apa_ tree. The tree itself transforms into a wild fox on full moon nights. The pat-pat of a lonesome trickster, wise and mischievous, haunts Remus, a waking dream he is unable to shake. He longs for this detachment from the red soil, from the farm and from the hoe.

 

Helen’s funeral is held ten days later as is the custom of Adamawa state. Remus is fourteen years old. The house’s pink paint is flaking. These are the facts. He can hear the congealed mass of grieving family unfamiliar, writhing together in their conceived-as-one pain. He can imagine the weird grimace on his father’s face as his in-laws walk up and down the house, touching things, smear them with their hands, leaving fingerprints of ownership on someone’s else grief.

The silver cross with a somber Jesus, prerequisite crown of thorns, nails in ankle and wrist, looking for all the world sadder than everyone else at the loss. The base of the cross is weathered by Helen’s frequent kisses and presses to the forehead in fervent prayer. So many Hail Marys said in anguish. They can take the cross if they like.

The cloth, used as Helen’s wrapper, her smell irrevocably edged and smote into the very dyed threads of the cloth, like you could unravel very thread and each individual one would smell like her lemon bath soap and chillies, her favourite (and frequently over-used in soups) spice. Remus will bite off the finger that lingers on this now-relic.

The comb. The Kehinde Balogun painting (won in a city-wide raffle). The hyacinth plant. Slippers, Ebenezer Obey records, a large amount of Scottish shortbread (bought in bulk at a supermarket in the capital for too much money). Shakespeare favourites in threadbare paperback (Othello, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream). A laugh bottled. Yarn and knitting needles in an opalescent case. Evenly-toned skin like grainless white oak. 

All detritus. All nothing. Now we eat grief for breakfast.

 

*

 

A perfunctory shower followed by the putting-on of funeral clothes (I won’t say the name!). Remus briefly stares at himself in the mirror, and like the flashbulb of a camera in its slow-motion growth and decay, he can hear the laugh and feel the smack on the back of his head as Helen says, “my very beautiful boy! you’ve got your father’s skin, as black as the Congo, but it is me everywhere else, eh? look, we have the same chin if you turn just like that. Can you see it? the very same line. My lost twin, that’s what you are.” She pulls his ear playfully and chuckles.

A white shirt, starched and black trousers, purchased the day before.

The door still creaks when you open it. Why is the door still the same when everything else is different. 

Relatives gather. Aunties (“oh dear Remus, you poor boy… our door is always open to you…”), uncles (“stay strong, young man, stay strong!”), cousins, thankfully mute, simply nodding. Millions of the unnamed. Remus is nauseated until he sees his father standing by the mantle and clenching a steaming mug of ginger tea in his own funeral (I won’t say it) suit and his tie undone, holding court with a gaggle of elderly women as they sigh repeatedly and canonise Helen. Just as Remus turns a corner to hide on the terrace, Lyall spots him and walks to him.

“Remus. I tried not to wake you.” Lyall stands with his shoulders and head bent towards Remus conspiratorially, taking up Remus’s space. His forehead is creased and his eyes are still rimmed red.

“Yes, well. I woke up anyway.” Remus turns away again. “I’m going to stand on the terrace for a while.”

Lyall smiles sadly. “Hm, okay.” He squeezes Remus’s shoulder. “We will be leaving for the service soon.”

On the terrace, a wicker chair sits fraying. Remus holds on to the cold metal railing. The sun continues to its graceful arc to high noon, accompanied with celebratory singing from birds. Someone unidentifiable cycles past on the street below.

 

The service is as painless as Remus expected. The church is filled to capacity with members of the church who were close to Helen. The pastor’s wife cries at the cemetery later. Lyall goes to comfort her and everything continues its pace. Even at the cemetery, Remus waits for the numbness to lift. He is almost angry at his cognitive functions for not allowing him public grief. For taking away the morsel of anguish deserved. He throws a bouquet of daffodils on the (no, I won’t say it!) casket. What a dirty word, he thinks. Casket. He can see his father crying now. Nobly, his tears on a silent journey down the hills of a gruff face. At the sight, a throb somewhere dull and uneven in his chest begins.

Ah, finally.

Two days later, people begin to disperse. Those with children first (daycare bills piling up, too many milestone events missed), then the younger ones from the city with white-collar jobs and scheduled dinner dates and then finally the elderly women; slowly but surely, they stop cooking large vats of soup and start packing away all of Helen’s things divided up into hessian bags and suitcases. Many many skirt suits from her teaching job, many many shoes and bags, many cases of jewellery make their voyage from wardrobe to sack. They mourn.

Remus and Lyall had decided on what to keep in silent accord the morning after her accident (no, I won’t say it!) death: the extra bars of hand-made soap, the mother-of-pearl comb and earring set (for your wife, Remus), the records, the journals, the rosary, the Kehinde Balogun painting (a cousin studying Politics and English at the university had asked repeatedly for it, Lyall repeatedly said no), the lavender plants in the back garden. The burn of chillies in the morning. These are the things we get to select after the loved shuffle off, tattered and just as unknowable as they were in life, their inner worlds their minds, closed off. 

This is what Remus wishes for the most, after the first few weeks (he finally, finally gets round to crying. Good. Long. Hard. Lyall cries too). That he knew more of what she thought, what she said, what she did when she was away from him. What did she say to her students at the state school? What advice did she offer? What did she talk about with the market-women as they piled heaps of _oha_ and _ewedu_ into her bags? What did she dream of the night before? What song was on the radio in the kitchen that morning? Did she sing along?

Remus, in search of more, steals away her journals, wrapped in old newspapers at the foot of her yawning-mouth wardrobe.

 

> 16 March 1979
> 
>  
> 
> Claudia is the worst. She thinks I should name him George, like some snobby Englishman. I’ll die before I do that. My baby is much too special.
> 
> Anyway, Lyall brought me daffodils! I’m very excited and afraid! It took him a long time to get to this point and I just don’t know if he’ll stay like this with me for long. He’s in the other room now, putting them in the vase I got last weekend. 
> 
> Lyall. What a mystery. Father will be angry when he finds out it’s him. Ugh, I don’t care though! I want to be cautious, I do but this man with his hunter’s skin and daffodil-buying… How am I supposed to resist?!
> 
> Oh, I can hear him pattering back. I hope he stays the night.
> 
>  
> 
> H

 

Remus copies out his favourite passages (the ones about him as a baby, about picnics, about her favourite students, long-winding passages about Lyall who, it becomes clear to Remus, she was very deeply in love with) into his own notebook. He tries to do it in her blocky handwriting but the pen keeps slipping back to his long windy script.

He sometimes cries while he is writing them, tears spreading blue ink out onto unmarked paper like lagoons flooding.

 

*

 

Time then does its gallop, the ever-laughing clown. Remus and Lyall’s apartment stops mourning. It stops being “the Lupins: Lyall, Helen and Remus” and it becomes “Lyall and Remus Lupin”. The comma takes its exit. Daffodils disappear, rubber plants take their place. Breakfast is shorter. The state school gets a replacement, an older man from the Western part of the country who wears large glasses that widen his eyes comically and prefers American writers, James Joyce and Hemingway. Remus goes back to school, albeit reluctantly because it means he’ll have to start cycling there since Helen usually drove him before her classes began. Remus still goes through her journals.

Then, like a riptide.

Remus returns from a neighbourhood football match, caked in dust, seeking cold water from the kitchen when he overhears this.

Lyall’s voice is tense. “…unnecessary. I said we were fine in my reply, did I not?”

A woman’s voice, gravelly and soothing. “Yes, you did say that but I was worried still. I mean, I know how you and Helen were. And Remus? It can’t be as easy as you say it is.”

“I don’t want you here, May.”

Some quiet follows this. Then the gravelly voice returns. “I won’t stay long. I just need to confirm that you and Remus are really okay and you won’t have to see me again.”

Lyall’s voice drops to normal. “God. I don’t know. He doesn’t know about you. What do I tell him? It’ll be too much for him.”

“Just four days, Lyall. Your own mother; you can’t give me four days?”

“This is not good for him. It isn’t —”

“Okene is a good eight hours away by road. It’s already six p.m.”

Another pause, then the door creaks open as Lyall steps out. Remus stands in the kitchen holding the unopened bottle of water. As he is processing the meaning of the conversation, Lyall pushes the door open. A woman is standing behind him, peering into the kitchen. Lyall turns back to look at her and clears his throat.

“Yes, hm… Remus, this is May, my mother and your grandmother.”

She steps froward, gliding past the awkward Lyall.

Remus thinks she looks so vividly surreal. Like an imagined thing. She is very tall, taller than Lyall, her skin is just as dark as his. They actually look similar around the eyes. She looks down at him. Remus, with an audible gasp of shock, notices her facial tattoos. Symbols, like writing but not, follow the arch of both her eyebrows. There are various configurations of dots and lines by her ears, under her bottom lip and on either side of her nose. She is sporting a gold nose ring. Her hair is a bright white matted in thick cornrows on her head. The parts of her skin that he can see (her forearms, her hands, her calves, her toes) are marked similarly.

Remus thinks of the word ‘formidable’.

She stretches forth a hand. “It’s nice to meet you, grandson.”

The bottle in his hands drips condensation to the linoleum floor. The hum of the refrigerator starts up in the silence. She draws her hand back to her side.

“We will get to know each other in time. Then…” She turns back to Lyall who is standing sheepishly with his arms crossed behind his back. “Where can I put my things, Lyall?”

“Um, Remus’s room, maybe?” He says to Remus. “I’m sorry, you’ll have to sleep on the cot in my room. It’s only for a few days.”

Remus nods and walks past both of them to his room where he begins packing away his things and hiding the more personal effects. He has a feeling she’ll poke around his room.

At dinner, Lyall and May move to the kitchen. May sits on the wicker chair she brought in from the terrace and Lyall moves around the kitchen, cooking, stirring, cutting. They’re talking in low tones, May seems to be most of the talking. Lyall sits opposite Remus on the table as they eat. May begs off dinner and drinks tea whilst keeping up conversation with Lyall about their family at home.

 

The whole arrangement sends his old-new routine into disarray. He usually returns to an empty house after school; Lyall normally coming in two hours after Remus gets off school. Now, when he returns, May is sitting out on the terrace fanning herself. He notices she has a bowl of water by her feet. She doesn’t seem to be drinking from it.

“Oh, Remus, it’s you! How was the learning?”

He pauses with his hand on the strap of his book bag. 

She continues to speak as she rises from her perch, bringing in the bowl of water with her and stands directly in front of hm, holding out the bowl in front of him like a gift. Remus notices the bowl is almost full to the brim and some water sloshes out the side. Earthenware, dark clay. Not something he’s seen around the house.

“I think we have a lot to learn from each other. I know that your father has not been very forthcoming about his and your family, and for that he has his reasons but as you probably know, he’s not always right.” She laughs lightly.

Remus said, “Where did you get that bowl?”

“Oh, well, I brought it with me.”

The next question bursts out of his mouth without checking with his mind first. The water in the bowl looked dark, like you couldn’t see the bottom of the bowl. Of what little Lyall had shared with Remus about his mother, Remus knew that she was untrustworthy.

“What’re you doing with it?” 

“Reading. Learning like you.”

The innocuous answer did not surprise him.

 

The next night, Remus was in the kitchen unable to sleep after waking from a dream that left him with an ambiguous feeling of dread. He was spreading strawberry jam over some bread when he spied May in the backyard from the kitchen window. The crescent moon languished over head as she leapt around frantically in sharp movements. Her mouth was moving and she was wearing a white cloth tied around her body and over her shoulders. He stood watching her by the sink with the tap running until she stilled and lay on the ground.

The dream Remus had after he forced himself to sleep was a cunning coiled snake of a thing. At first, Remus was sure he was dreaming and then he wasn’t. Like the information just skipped out of his ear and wandered off into the vast field of corn he was standing in. May chased him like the Minotaur around the field, the labyrinth becoming more and more dastardly and picturesque as she cackled madly. She dropped several objects around his mind. Threads of conversations, punches unthrown and his mother’s songs, unravelled from spools in her hands. Remus would pick up these things and he cradled them in him arms and cooed at them like they were young lambs. The dreams were unforgiving in their clarity and terror. Remus awoke from these sojourns with a fine sheen of sweat on his skin and his mouth open like he was cursing whilst awake. His sleep stolen and kept in a tattered sack under May’s bed. She fed his sleep scraps. How could he know that she had kidnapped his sleep and bound it to the chain at her waist?

In the morning, Remus woke to find May standing in front of his bed and he wondered how she could’ve gotten in without alerting Lyall or himself. She looked like much older than she had ever looked. Her mouth was in a tight line and the tattoos blended into her skin until it looked like there were a series of strange welts from a flogging imprinting her whole body. Her left hand was clutching one end of the white cloth he recognised from a few hours ago. It was like the dream had come in, poured out of his mouth screaming to the end of his bed. The curtain behind her fluttered.

“Did you wake me?” Which was not what he wanted to say.

“No. But I was in your dream. I put myself there.”

“You can’t keep doing this —“

“I can. It’s in you too.” 

This was the dream replaying. Scene 1. Replay. Rewind. Step forward.

“You need to leave. I’ll tell my father everything.”

“You won’t. Because you want to know.” She shifted her weight onto her other leg and then walked to the side of his bed. The apparition was a never-ending thing and his heart hammered. She sat down. “You’re going to tell Lyall that you need to leave this house and stay with me.”

“No - no, I’m not. I can’t. My mother…” Not what he wanted to say that time either. What was she doing to him? His forehead broke out in a sweat. His heart beat even faster.

“That’s exactly why you need to leave.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about —“ His eyes started to sting and he wiped them stubbornly.

He looked away from her and at his hands. Something there was unrecognisable, like the lines on his palm had undergone a re-configuration.

“I haven’t done anything to deserve this. Why can’t you leave me alone?”

“This is no torment. It is fate playing out.”

“But I don’t know what it is! Everything, the things you kept saying…” He felt more and more disconnected. His mouth moved slower. He turned to May and she was not at his side.

Sharply, his hold on the duvet loosened and in a blink, he was on the floor by his bed and his body contorted. His elbow moved to his ears and his knees locked. He could feel his eyes water and his mouth was open and he heard a distant screaming. His head rocked back and forth on the carpet, hitting the leg of his bed. 

 

*

 

Lyall paced the kitchen. May sat on a stool cutting onions badly and Remus stood, intent on the linoleum pattern. Lyall started and stopped his rant while May and Remus interjected, Remus less so.

May arbitrary swiped at her eyes tearing up from the onions and continued, “Well, frankly considering Remus’s current state, you have no other choice.”

Lyall waved his arms around, “We have medicine! Professionals!” He turned to Remus. “Why don’t you want to go to the hospital? Please let me take you there.”

“But - but I don’t need to go, I’m fine. I only want —“

“To leave, yes, I know. But Remus, son, you had a seizure. You know what that is?” Remus stayed quiet and looked back to the linoleum. 

In the early hours, Lyall found his son sobbing and bruised, too sore to get back on his bed. He’d promptly tried to haul him into the back of his son and drive the forty minutes to the nearest hospital until May stopped him and Remus woke up. Since then May calmly set about making a breakfast which she’d never done the five days she’d stayed with them, and convincing Lyall not to take Remus to the hospital and instead back to her house. 

Remus himself left so out of it, out of his mind with fear and renewed grief and hot anger at his powerlessness. Though it seemed improbable, he felt like he had no choice in the matter. He could not put his mind back into his body and if he didn’t concentrate hard enough, he could feel his hands slipping off the reins. Whatever May wanted him to do, he would do. Just to end the feeling.

Lyall huffed in frustration and leant against the counter with his arms crossed and stared at Remus.

May dropped the chopped onions into a pan of hot oil and asked Remus to pass her some eggs from the fridge. He got the small crate of eggs and stood next to her as she took them one after the other, cracking them open with a fork and throwing the shells into the trashcan.

 

*

 

Lyall stubbornly refused to pack more than two weeks’ worth of clothing.

“And Remus and I are not staying at your house. We’re going to stay in the family house.”

“God, Lyall, it’s been shut for years now. Honestly, you’re being ridiculous. And inconsiderate.” May said, her smile dipping into the sides of her face. Remus nodded. This kind of unwittingly placid response had been coming from him unasked for since the morning May came into his room. She had refused to address it with him since, only in dreams where she relentlessly chased him with the devil and snakes writhing in her hair and hands. His frustration caused him to skive off on his appetite and he stopped going to the school a few days before, when he’d blacked out suddenly while walking behind the school with a friend. Now it appeared he had no control over his brain, his functions. Only for a few hours in the day did he feel like he had his body to himself. He could not remember the last time he slept properly and was anxiously waiting for the moment he could corner May and do something to her. Exactly what he could do, he had not figured. Even more puzzlingly he could not surmise why he had not told his father of it. So he sat, like a pruned flower, dead on a dusty road to be driven over and trampled on.

Lyall looked at Remus with incredulity as he was now wont to do and shook his head. “That’s my final say on this. Both of you. I clean up some of the rooms with Remus’s help. And I think Aunt Linda has the keys.”

At their stop, there was a slight moment where Lyall looked afraid, staring into the distance like he recognised some familiar spirit in the dust whirlwinds trailing small naked children running and tagging each other. In this scene of serene domesticity, Lyall’s jaw tensed and a change like something ripping across the veil could be heard in the sky and on the skin of lovers entwined.

 

Somehow Remus lost grasp off everything as the days turn into weeks in Okene. Lyall was sort of stumped by memory and paralysed in hazy nostalgia by the old family house and was more and more absorbed with revisiting heirlooms and seeing old friends who had not left the town. In this, Remus was left to his devices for quite some time. There had been abortive attempts at conversation those first few days and Remus could not come up with an proper explanation at the opportunity to tell Lyall what he suffered. He instead burst into tears at each enquiry. Lyall assumed it was something to do with the loss of Helen and tried to give him enough space to “put himself together and stop attaching himself to his grandmother.” 

This led Remus taking out his bike once Lyall was out of the house and cycling very furiously such as to escape the yawning open mouth that was now his mind. For those few hours, he would speed past many on the market days through the small small town into the proper country of federal expressway and large viniferous trees. He was able to put to bed some of the more terrifying things developing inside him that he could not even take out to expose in the sunlight. There was a lot of screaming in the forest and things that he thought only medieval heroes engaged in. He was mostly surprised that devil’s horns were not actually growing out of his skull and that he had not yet developed primary characteristics of the damned the excluded the possessed in actuality. 

 

All the condemnation finally brought him, on a very sweaty late afternoon, to May’s farmland that sat on Are hill. He stood fully convinced he must have life and dreaded the whole thing because he did not really recall the mechanism by which he was able to locate the piece of land that he’d never seen in his life. He shivered when he looked up at the sprawling thing like cobras dancing and very particular blackness. He threw his bike to the side. Water travelled long and torturous down his forehead and he could taste the virginal sweat and something in him was very much on fire. And then he climbed up, pulling at clods of earth and falling down and scraping his knees, the steep slope and heat produced a very small short metamorphosis and he was so convinced when he knelt in the ground, the tilled soil, looking for a sharp pointed piece of rock that he would sink beautifully into her skull and her blood would run the beatific red and all would be well. Sio he clutched the rock when he saw it, his pulse jumped once but he held it firmly and walked to the low house.

Remus stood in the doorway. The house was cool inside unlike the scorching hell beast mouth of the outside. He walked in and it appeared there was no one there.

He called May’s name once. He continued slowly, concealing the rock behind himself. He walked to the back of the house and saw her spitting intermittently into an earthen ware bowl not unlike the one she’d held at the house. Her back was to him and he knew it like the lifelines on his palms that this was it. He knew it and walked with more purpose than he knew was contained in his tiny skinny body with ribs and things were undone and undoing in it. 

He raised the rock and struck her on the back of her neck. She fell like slow motion, turning to face him and her face contorted into a smile polite and concealing. She laughed as she fell to the ground and felt at the back of her head. Her hand pulled away with red. 

She smiled even wider at this.

 

“I’m glad you found it within yourself to do this. It just proves I’m right. And I feel you are now realising this.” She sighed and spread her fingers on the red ground sandy and shameful looking. Remus’s chest heaved and heaved and heaved and everything was collapsing in like the paper was being folded and folded and folded unto itself and it was made very clear. 

(You are not here and you do not matter and you make decisions based on the predestined ones made for you. You have no conscience. Give up. You do not know yourself. Stop fighting.)

May said, “You’re going to have to help me into the house. Then we can discuss the next steps we need to take for you to begin your journey. Come on.” 

She lifted her hand to Remus. “Help me up.”

Remus felt the rock fall to the ground and went to May.

After she was seated and Remus had cleaned up the blood from the back of her head, she lay back on the pillows he put around her and smiled at him.

 

This was followed by her kind of overly indulging in some prophecy that Remus had trouble following as he swam in and out of focus of some reality he happened to be living. He located the humour in the situation somehow and was having some deranged fun toying with the idea of trying to hit her properly one more time. But then she would say something like, “And I hate your father. He’s a terrible son and has never been kind to me.” And that would pull him back and he would press the cloth a bit harder on her head and she would wince and it was a little fun game they had together.

At twilight, he lit candles for her in some obscure dead symbol drawn in in chalk on the floor of her dining room filled to the brim with old cabinets of old dusty china. The symbol was moving as though it could’ve been playing with the flickering shadows of the flames. He stood where he was asked to stand though, he was pulling out blood from his palms for pressing his nails into them in half moon shapes like decorating appliqué patches like on cloth. 

She poured some water on his head and told him to take off all his clothes and said a few wordless incantations wherever she touched him, on his shoulders and then on his chest and a finger in his navel and then on his penis and then on his calves on his feet and she said more strange mouth twisting things to him; it ended kind of abruptly with her walking off into the rest of the house and asking him to pack up the detritus.

Later, Lyall came over and ate dinner with them. At the table, Remus was fighting off a good cry which Lyall very succinctly sensed in Remus’s very acute desperation to get out of May’s house and so bundled him up like he was four years old and carried him in his arms down the hill at a very fast pace almost tripping. They walked silently on the road until they reached the old beige Nissan parked by the main road that he had been driving around. 

Remus shivered violently in the passenger seat and was full of all kinds and forms of trepidation about what had unfolded and was going to unfold. Lyall kept looking across at him, his frown getting deeper at each turn.

“Hey”, Lyall tapped Remus’s bare knee. “Are you doing okay?”

Remus did not reply.

“I know you’ve been caught up in this mess and I have not handled myself very well for you.” Lyall wiped his left hand over his hair. “I have not been able to do well without your mother.”

Remus said very quietly, “It’s not your fault this is happening.”

“Yes, well. You’ve always been very forgiving of me. Just like your ma.”

For no reason, Remus replied, “She loved you very much.”

Lyall smiled and he wiped his eyes. Remus looked away from him. He’d always felt like an intruder; even before he’d read Helen’s student-day journals. Their lives had been spinning towards each other for so long and so violently with much force that he could only fathom how much of an intrusion his birth must’ve been on their relationship.

Lyall said, his voice thick with long grief that already sounded old and worn and familiar, “Yes, she did. I don’t know why and all I could do was love her in return. I really miss her.”

 

*

 

Remus continued to visit May afterwards. Lyall finally got him into the small secondary school in the town. It had less variety in classes, shorter lesson hours and less books than his former school. Remus stood out frighteningly, a “city boy” was what they called him. His accent was such a source of name-calling that he tried to reduce the times he spoke in class, at school, at all. He could not seem to find a kind of understanding with any of the other kids in his class and so he often stayed away from the playground during breaks and wandered behind the defunct chemistry lab, with cobwebs and dusty wooden chairs and broken glass beakers. In the old biology labs, there were still old bottles of frogs in formaldehyde, their limbs spread out like in fervent prayer to some eternal force beyond their control. Remus broke open one of these bottles and the dead toad lay on the ground like the worst kind of underwhelming surprise.

His listless time in the terrible, under-funded schools with the poorest students and the tired teachers made him look forward to May’s operations of solemnity and savagery. 

Her appearance began to scare him less as he made the never-ending climb up the hill to her homestead in the late afternoon scruffy and thirsty for anything that made sense. The sun in Okene drove the sane to wall breaking madness and escapades of all kinds of genuine desperation took place in that town. May never went into the main centre because she was feared for good reason by the townspeople. She was generally treated as a pariah and the source of all their misfortune. (Hm yes, it is her, the filthy rag with the thing scouring our rubbish and infecting our children with smallpox and the marijuana addiction and making them lose their fear of God and giving them depravity and the devil in return.)

So she frequently sent Remus back down into the town to run her errands in secret. It came to the knowledge of some families that he was connected to her and some of that anger and social isolation was deflected onto him.

 

When he showed up, May would probably be embroiled in some kind of dispute with a member of the community or with a worker on her land and she would direct him into the house. He would change out his uniform into a spare batch of clothes he carried around now and he’d do her dishes or clean up her living room’s chalk drawings and so on and sit around on the verandah with a bottle of cola until she reappeared. She’d complain and complain about whatever argument she’d been having until she calmed down enough to pull out her bags and chests of curses littered around the house.

The sacks-bags-chests were crazily inconspicuous and never looked like they carried some kind of new fresh terror in them that either involved May cutting a line in her thigh to begin the ceremony or something strange unreal thing that could only be really presented in the metaphysical so they’d both have to go into a trance, May inducing sleep in him until they could actually reach whatever sacred thing that she could trap into one of the many chests. 

Some things were abstract and away from him and unknowable. May had her mother’s memory of her own childbirth trapped in a teacup that she wrapped in many layers of black plastic bags. Sounds of phantom crowds roaring. A dead servant boy’s future. Some feeble indecipherable sorrow. All chased down in the spirit by this woman in Babylonian fashion of somehow sifting through people’s flesh and very lifeblood’s content to realise the unrealisable and she would come back and sigh and smile like The Victor.

Or she chased Remus, taking and taking and taking, fighting him tooth and nail for things he could not give up. He would wake up heady and vomit all over himself and she washed him and gave him his father’s old clothes and he could not stop crying. When she did his, he would avoid her for a few days and cling to his father rather embarrassingly until the shaking stopped. Lyall was patient, feeding him and stroking his back and putting away his grief like moth-eaten finger gloves, to be looked at with reverence and put away till one got the confidence to burn them sacrificially.

Remus was suffering from like an acute cognitive dissonance in which he had difficulty discerning between the times he spent in dreamscapes, syrupy and unreal, and the times he was sitting in school staring at a chalkboard as the voice of an English teacher washed over him. He’d wake up in his bed when the last thing he remembered was talking to Lyall while they did the dishes. Or he’d suddenly realise that he was on May’s veranda when he could not remember walking in.

It was like his whole existence was elastic and stretched far past his fingers and far past anything.

 

Like the fraudulent sin-maker he was, not even becoming it but in full transformation, an “i don’t know who that is in the mirror”, a new me, old hat phrases on metamorphosis and a very desperate lonely writhing thing settling inside ribs and making a home, vengeance and blood and the spitting and the nearness of death. sitting beside the thing.

in all this, Remus found himself standing hunched in the back over various dream scrawls, trying to decipher some way to find the road less travelled, seeing clarity and unity of self, all the things people write about in holy books. But seeking it from the merciful devil, wondering what he would offer in his compassion. In this, he sinned. 

 

/

 

As it was, time did pass. And Lyall grew frustrated with the dementia and said a non-contact goodbye to Remus, quietly packing away his things and wringing his hands at the state of his loss and failure, having it all taking away from him. He took the bus to a bigger town nearby and he chose to forget everything that happened by the time he was there.

 

> Remus,
> 
> I’m going to Lokoja for a while. You’re going through something and I don’t know how to be of help. It seems that time with your grandma is helping, however I cannot endure much longer.
> 
> I will be back soon. Just write me if you need anything.
> 
> Dad
> 
>  

Remus returned to the house even more depressed as usual, seeking to avoid and cherish at the same time the wailing voice of his depressed father but the house was very empty like a bottle and everything was poured out on the floor and the whole openness of a vessel. Things had been surreptitiously packed away. Then Remus left and took what he needed and was very much convinced that it is for the best. (Yes, for the best. Let him save himself. For the best. Yes. This is how it should be I am too lost at this point. And I am not myself and we are different now and I don’t know what happened but something has changed.)

 

Remus also discovered May’s secret wherein she had been providing certain members of the community with charms to help their farmland harvest and so on in exchange for food and money. And Remus was stunned by this. 

“I’m pretty sure that same man has spat on us as we walked past. That’s who you’re doing all this for?” May was braiding her hair on a stool in the verandah. She’d been talking about getting more goats’ blood and Remus interjected, frustrated at her blasé tone.

“Right. So how did you find out?”

“Doesn’t matter at all.”

“We need some kind of immunity.”

Which made no sense because Remus knew that May would much rather skin her self alive than do anything responsible or ask for something as trivial and cowardly as immunity.

Remus was proven right only a few days later.

He slept in May’s living room on a cot since Lyall left and did not hear anything except a vicious wind. Some men came in and ransacked May’s room and destroyed all the things in chests and sacks and she screamed holy terror, whipped and beaten by them with cutlasses and clubs, assailing her body with holy blow after holy blow, righteous, assured-by-the-Lord blow. Spare not the witch.

And just as quickly as they appeared they departed the room and made for the door, by which Remus was hiding in the dark in the shadow by way of sheer blind unspoken evil with a kitchen knife used to slit the throats of white hens glinting in the moon light from the far window. And he may have been feeling possessed and he lunged wildly at many bodies and there was much screaming, from him and from the men. They hurried out quick-like and Remus’s hands were very bloody and he went into May’s room and she was laying on the floor penitent-like and had set up many mirrors around her and her eyes were very vacant and her mouth moved silently and it was if the darkness around her grew wings and soared magnificently into itself.

She rose to a sitting position and her shoulder shook with silent laughter as the room got darker the more she laughed and Remus’s hands were still bloody. May stood up and was not herself. She lunged for Remus’s forearm and forced him to his knees and put her hands on his temples and she said a few words and the knife clattered to the floor from his hands.

 

Somewhere in him, the winged dark outside in the room came in, crowding up taking up all the space it made its way in and pushed him to the side and raised his arms and his legs and took the knife and smiled. And he knew a fiery bloodlust, like he could taste the beauty in the war and in death in his mouth and so much of the pain of centuries ago gathered inside and he burned spectacularly for all the pain that could be ravished in from somewhere inside and from others around him and so he stabbed May in the stomach and then ran outside the house down the hill, so fast which he couldn’t remember seeing any of it. He slashed at himself furiously also as he came down the hill. And he continued running towards the town and slew the old woman who was walking towards him on the night road. There her blood split and he yanked her head back and wiped the blood on his face and his hands and continued. He entered houses and slew crying children and shouting mothers and he fought fathers down, and stabbed them multiple times in front of each other and it was not enough.

The streets were an ultraviolent church in the fog. Dissonant screaming like pealing of bells some holy sacrosanct motive filling up with heat with glory and honour and more of the pain. 

May was winged in black flying across the town like a biblical pestilence and the people fell gracefully to the ground crumpling like marionette dolls cut from strings, ever sure.

Like a swarm of flying locusts, more and more men fled around them, hiding in houses laying on their stomaches in unlit farmland with tall maize crops.

And May laughed, rapturous almost. She stood on the corrugated tin roof on a house balancing on the tips of her toes, skeletal black wings behind her, the rest of the world beneath her feet and she was powerful, all-knowing, ever-present. 

All around them were bodies, either bleeding or not. It was very quiet then, people sliced into fear and trembling. May walked on the road, tapping temples and transporting something into bottles she took from inside her clothes and went to men and tapped them one by one.

Remus turned to May and slashed her arm again and they fought until she restrained his head with some ephemeral rope and dragged him to his knees. She kicked him repeatedly on the ribs until he could not stand then she took them both back to her house on the hill. 

She did not go directly into the house and walk around the edges of the farm land with her bottles clinking and Remus yoked by the invisible walking despondent and weak beside her. As she walked around the perimeter, she tipped each small vial on the land and the men appeared again though gaunt and barely there. Their eyes were chasmal and black and their hands were tipped with black blood that dripped steadily to the soil. The men dragged their feet around the the towering mazes crops and tomato vines and May laughed again. The revenants walked into each other, barely touching the crops. Even in semi-death, they looked pained and without rest. 

“Pick up the hoes and work! Aha!” She screamed.

At her command, each apparition picked up a farm tool and began to either till or plough the soil in no direction without explanation. 

May huffed and walked in with Remus. She kept him tied down in the sitting room as the sun began its ungodly ascent on the still hill as May set about the house, picking cracked broken things up and moaning. She eventually packed most of it away still seething and finally came to stand where Remus lay crumpled on the carpet. She released him off the rope and then whatever dark it was in him fled and his body ached and he was overwhelmed with such sour-tasting guilt, he wept again and again until the headache and dehydration sent him into a fitful sleep.

 

/

 

Lyall is on a bus back to Okene after hearing of the attack on the town. He is determined to force Remus back with him, if he is still alive. (My son, oh my God.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title from Neutral Milk Hotel's song, "Two-Headed Boy, Part II". There's a part one but I'm really referencing this song instead.  
> Zero betas on this.  
> Here's some Ebenezer Obey (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ICRmEyKt-A), I couldn't figure out how to hide it appropriately.  
> I'm hoping to get into the story of R and S together in Kano in the next few chapters, so I'm holding off on the backstory for now.  
> Sorry that this story is updated monthly. I have poor time management skills. But I liked this when I read it. I also like feedback so if you glance at this, tell me how you feel about it. I've never written fic before.  
> Edit: Kehinde Balogun is a bastion of Nigerian art and I was incredibly fortunate to meet him a few times. Look him up!


	7. i see you behind a veil

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Remus and Sirius, on glances and dust.

 

Somewhere in-between the raging student rally and the second, maybe third bar they’d waltzed into (arms on someone’s shoulders and fraught hope ringing out of voices that echoed from all around him), Remus lost count of the beers that’d been palmed over to him. The group was starting to treat him a bit more like a colleague and Remus was glad, even if it came along with copious alcohol. 

The bar was small and very noisy even though it held about thirty members of the association and some other students from the rally. It was filled to the ceiling with cigarette smoke and someone hijacked the PA system and Fela’s Zombie Live record now blared above the din of laughing and debate.

He was sitting with Elizabeth who he recognised from faculty meetings at his department in the university. She was getting her Masters in History two years above him and was also a student teacher in one of his seminar groups. She sat next to him in a booth and they’d been sucked into discussion of a text that she’d been assigned a few weeks ago before she begun ferociously kissing a guy wearing a motorcycle jacket. Remus left it alone and was feeling slightly put out. 

Again, he caught Sirius’s eye roaming over the heads in the room. He was standing by the end of the bar with some friends. As Remus caught his gaze, Sirius grinned and raised his glass of shiny, amber liquid in a silent toast and dropped his focus back to the group around him. Remus shivered. 

 

Remus had cut out the picture of Sirius in the student paper a month ago and it hung on his bedroom wall behind the mirror, accusing him from behind layers of wood, ionised silver and glass. He had taken it down and put it back up several times after. What was initially a simple fascination as with dead frogs, put on the coat of a slight, shy admiration, a longing with which Remus was unfamiliar. He found himself doing strange things, wherein he sought Sirius’s company at the worst of times. He made too much room in his study/work schedule for group meetings, earning himself a place as a regular attendee. Remus would listen to the vibrant discussions, debates and sparring at the edge of his seat, fixated on Sirius’s expansive hand gestures and moving mouth. After the meetings in the lecture theatre on the upper floor of the disused Geography faculty house, Remus hung back to pack up the mugs stained with black tea and talk to Sirius as he took down minutes from the meetings. Sirius was an engaging conversationalist with far-reaching knowledge about everything from Greek philosophy to the most affordable markets in Kano. But other times, Remus completely avoided him, unable to look him in the eye and refusing invitations to group lunches. He would physically flinch at the sound of Sirius’s voice sometimes, like it grated on his skin. There was a wrestling in him that kept him trapped within his fluctuating feelings.

 

He was pulled out of this morbid thought chain by Elizabeth’s hand on his forehead.

“Oh boy, what’s wrong?”

He turned to her, fixing a placid smile on his face. It appeared the man in the jacket had left.

She giggled, “Looks like you’ve had a few more beers than I have.” She shifted closer to him and he could feel her hip at his side.

“Do you want to leave? We can go back to mine and sleep off the drink.”

“Yeah… Will you wait though? I need the toilet.”

She nodded. “I’ll be right here, don’t get lost on your way back.”

Remus stood, holding onto the top of the booth for support and carried his wiry body across the floor to the doors at the other end of the bar.

He struggled to push the door back and shuffled inside still holding his bottle. The light in the cramped toilet were dim and flashed with menace. He raised a hand to his face and looked accusingly at the lightbulb dangling off a thin wire from the low ceiling. 

Only as he turned on the spot trying to find the actual toilet did he notice that there was someone else in the bathroom. With a jolt, he saw Sirius slumped over the toilet with his forehead resting on grimy tiles that looked grey in the flashing. Remus heard the quiet shallow breaths from Sirius’s open mouth. Before he could decide what to do, Sirius raised his head from the wall.

Remus stilled at this and he reached out to touch Sirius’s shoulder.

“Are you all right?”

Sirius looked askance at him and ran his hands over his head.

“I’m just tired, I think I’d better go home.”

“Oh, I’m leaving too… You could come back with us, Eliza and I. We were going back to her dorm to sleep but we can go to mine instead if you want.”

At the following silence, Remus worried that the statement sounded lecherous and he shouldn’t have said anything. They weren’t _all that_ close (and there was no reason why he’d want to come back to yours, you’re not even friends! why did you think he’d say yes?)

“Can I use the…?”

“Oh, of course.” Sirius stepped back from the wall and leaned against the door facing away from Remus and said, “I’d like to come back to yours, if it’s not inconvenient. I think James will want to stay longer.”

“Hm… I hope you don’t mind, we’ll be walking back.”

“It’s all right, I need to walk into some level of sobriety.” Sirius let out a dry chuckle. The door shut quietly as he went out.

Remus let out some steadying breaths.

 

Elizabeth walked between them with her arms around their shoulders. She laughed brightly at Sirius’s innocuous impersonations of their mutual friends. As they approached the campus gates, Remus’s heart began to skip over beats. There he wrapped his hands over the precious few pieces in his head while Elizabeth stood under the yellow porch-light in front of the doorway of her girls only dorm. Her hands were over both of Sirius’s arms and they seemed to be having some kinetic bond manifestation in the way they were looking each other, the only way drunk victors can summon emotions. They both looked very solemn and very gaunt and beautiful. She pressed her cheek to Sirius’s and let go of him. Remus was engulfed in a frightening jealousy. If they turned to look at his face, he would be stripped bare, embarrassed. 

He turned away and started for the road leading back to the campus gates. 

A few minutes passed till he heard Sirius running behind him. He fell in step quietly and stuck his hands into his jeans pockets. Remus snuck a glance at him and Sirius was looking right back at him. A space in his chest swelled and he looked away. Sirius shook out a cigarette from a pack of Rothmans. He walked with Remus staying a few steps ahead, the air in a tense quiet punctuated by Sirius’s exhalations of smoke. 

 

Remus lived in a rented room on the first floor of a family’s house. The other room was rented out to a graduate student from the university. The ground floor was occupied by the family who owned the house. Their children were still in grade school and the husband travelled frequently and for long periods, working on off-shore oil rigs. The house was a bright spot in Remus’s life; he babysat for their mother when she went out some evenings to night school for copywriter training. She was very young and from the west of the country and didn’t speak Hausa, the principal language of Kano, so she spent a lot of time alone.

When he wasn’t at work, he sat in her kitchen cutting onions and stirring pots of beef stew on the counter as she chatted with him in a broken English. She would ask him of his schooling and his parents and ask him the meaning of certain Hausa words as they cooked together. 

 

Sirius stood on the landing in front of his room as Remus wrangled with himself and with the keys. He could hear Sirius’s lace-up boots scuffing the wall.

“Could you stop hitting the wall? I don’t want to have to paint over it when I move.” Remus said with more venom than he intended.

“Sorry.” 

Remus got the door open. Sirius stood in the middle of the room and Remus walked past him shamefaced trying to imagine what the sparse room looked like from his eyes. 

A mattress pushed up to one wall under the single window, books stacked by either side of a bedside drawer on the opposite wall and one large suitcase of clothes to the side, still open. There were some oxford shirts hanging on hooks behind the door and next to it was a long pane of silver backed glass propped on the wall. There was a framed photo of Helen on the drawer and a poster from one of the group’s public seminars from the year before pinned to the wall parallel to the mattress.

Sirius knelt by the drawer and looked through the titles as Remus sat on the mattress and pulled off his shoes.

“I’m going to go to change.” Remus said to Sirius’s back. Without waiting for a reply, Remus gathered his sleep-shirt from the mattress and went to the toilet further down the floor.

He gripped the edges of the sink for seconds until he could unhinge his joints to pull of his corduroy trousers and shirt. When he got out, he looked out the sliver between the door and the frame and saw Sirius sitting with his legs folded into each other and his head in his right hand. The light from the window lit him from behind, lending his face dramatic shadowy depth.

Remus entered the room twisting his fingers in the hem of his faded t-shirt and sat down as Sirius moved to the bed and lay on his chest. He placed his shoes beside the mattress by his head. The sodium yellow streamed in.

“Thanks for letting me bunk here.” His voice was muffled by the pillow. He uncrossed an arm and placed his hand on the bare part of Remus’s thigh.

“It’s okay.” Remus stretched out next to him and looked up at the ceiling.

After a while, when Remus’s breaths were getting deeper, Sirius said, “Is that your mother on the dresser?”

“Yeah.” A pause. “She died… I think, seven years ago?”

Sirius lifted his head to look at Remus. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay.” Remus shifted to rest his head on the wall. “I miss her a lot. We were very close.”

“And your father?”

“He lives in Gwarzo. He works on a site there but I see him most weekends.”

“I haven’t seen my parents in years. I’m disowned.”

Remus was shocked into silence. He assumed that someone as well-off, as effusive, had a supportive family somewhere.

“Ha! You should see your face right now.” Sirius laughed and continued. “I’m better off, don’t worry.”

Remus turned his head to see Sirius’s eyes closed. He reached out a finger to follow the arch of his eyebrow. Sirius flinched, his eyes flashed open and he sat up.

“I’m sorry!” Remus drew his hand back.

“No, it’s okay. I just… wasn’t expecting it.” Sirius lay back down, holding Remus’s gaze. “See? It’s fine. You can go ahead.” 

In the quiet frailty suddenly turned threatening, Remus put his hands under his head instead. Sirius sighed and turned his body facing away from him.

 

Remus woke first, a film of sweat on his skin and damp spots on his shirt. Sirius had turned to face him in his sleep and curled into himself. The sun broke into the room in shafts of dull light. It looked early, he must’ve slept only a few hours. He rose and stood above the mattress trying to burn the image of Sirius into his eyes. He’d slept in his jeans. He could see the brown leather belt holding up his trousers.

(Get it together. Get. It. Together. If he wakes up to you eyeballing him, he’ll likely never speak to you again. Just because he’s somewhat progressive doesn’t mean he’ll appreciate your advances, no matter how fractured. He’s probably already got someone too.)

Scolding himself, he went to the shared bathroom, hoping that physical distance would draw his thoughts away from him.

He showered quickly not eager to stay long under the cold water. He kept his mind blank as he changed into a fresh shirt and went back to his room. 

Sirius was sitting up in the bed when he came in, reading an old newspaper Remus had flung underneath the mattress. 

“Hello.” Sirius said cheerily. Remus nodded back.

Sirius stood up and put his feet back into his boots. “Listen, I hope things are okay with us. I mean, I think of you as a friend more than anything… And you’ve always been really helpful to the cause…” Sirius’s forehead scrunched up as his words trailed off. 

“I’m — “

“It’s not a big deal that I slept here though.”

Remus nodded again.

“Right. I’ll be going then.”

“Do you need help getting back?”

“No. I recognised the street when I looked out the window. There’s a music shop I frequent around here.”

Sirius stood by the door as Remus walked back to the bed.

“I’ll see you around.”

 

*

The house Sirius ended up in during the Maitatsine riots belonged to James, his younger sister, Frances and his mother Mariam. They were standing around the dining table, arguing the effectiveness of calling the police versus they all going out themselves, when they heard groans.

When James went out and saw his former classmate bleeding all over the carpet and looking very nearly dead, he sprung into action. He called for his mother and sister who came and helped carry him onto the dining table. Mariam heaved a large first aid box onto the table and stemmed the blood coming out of his side.

When he regained consciousness, they fed him some oatmeal and fruits. After Iftar, the last daily prayer, Mariam sat next to Sirius alone and asked him who he was. Sirius was honest with her. He asked that she wait to report him back to the palace, explaining without details, his unfriendly relations with his family. She agreed to keep him for a few days.

The next morning, she and her two children woke for Fajr and ate a breakfast of toast and masa with honey. Sirius borrowed a plain shirt and jeans from James who was a little bigger than him. Afterwards, the community centre Mariam organised arrived in the front room. Many neighbours, about nine families stood and sat with their children in various states of anxiety, already discussing and assigning tasks for the immediate neighbourhood. It was an eye-opener for Sirius, the display of arm-in-arm courage.

Immediately after the whirlwind meeting, Mariam handed him a shovel and pointed out a group of boys to him.

“I’m sorry, I know you’re healing but we really need all the help we get. Some of the houses two streets from here have caved in from bullet holes and people need to recover their belongings.”

He stood feeling unsure. Mariam looked back and added. “James will join you in a minute, I just need him to help me carry some of the food around.”

He met up with the rest of the boys assigned to digging and lost himself in the demand of manual labour on his body. He walked automatically from house to house in, sweat streaming down his forehead. When the shovelling was done, he started helping people move furniture out the houses, carrying sacks of rice in and out of kitchens.

This was how James found him, standing in the doorway of a kitchen with a sack of cassava flour at his feet talking to a man and his wife, drinking some water after they finished cleaning a kitchen.

They walked back to James’ house where Mariam was serving rice in paper plates to workers. There were children milling around in the back with some of the women who were gathered around pots over large fires. A few minutes after Sirius and James sat cross legged on the floor digging into the lunch, some policemen stopped at the door and spoke to Mariam and a few other neighbours. 

Sirius watched them from the screen window. The two men stood cringing under Mariam and another woman’s comments. They were pointing out some of the damage in the street as the policemen looked around frowning. 

The policemen came into the house and addressed them, “The riots are being investigated by our colleagues. Thank you for your patience with us and for your community work.” 

All the air in the room was sucked out in the silence following their statement. Only the sound of the children playing in the back filtered in. The policemen left.

As the workers raised their voices in disparity, James and Sirius went up to James’s room. James lay flat on the floor flicking through a stack of vinyl by his player. He put on Sam Cooke’s “Live at the Copa” and rested his head by the speaker, humming along.

 

Sirius stayed with James and his family for two weeks until Mariam pressed him into contacting his parents. He went to the local police station and reported himself. They reached the royal emissary that was in the town clearing rubble and giving speeches. Sirius waited in the station sitting on a bench in James’s clothes with Mariam. 

Some hours later, he was picked up by a lone driver, wearing sunglasses and a dark kaftan. As he was driven back to the palace, his mind emptied. He was spared the wrath of his parents who left him to his devices. No one aside from the palace staff spoke to him. 

An official of the British High Commission met with him and his mother in one of the palace’s courtyards. His study visa was cleared and forms were filled and signed. While his travel plans were being put together, he visited James. They stayed out late on a dusty football pitch, sitting on the bleachers talking about wide, wild things involving reunions and rescues.

 

*

Due to infernal longing, instead of going back to his room to eat and sleep after the longest seminar of his young adult life concerning preposterous land titles in the Victorian era, Remus walked the 35 minutes to the group was having a weekly report meeting at. It was a dismal Tuesday evening, the grey storm clouds performing a ballet over the red yellow orange dusk sky and the two worlds met as if perpetuated from the inside of a poet in a singular space liminal and so on. It followed Remus on his walk during which he was barely functioning and could’ve gotten lost but didn’t.

He was asleep for the most of the meeting; the hum of conversation a soothing lullaby. He was woken up by Sirius who had a very bemused look on his face. 

“Hey, we’re done here.”

Remus looked around, truly the room was emptying. He mumbled unintelligibly and put his satchel over his shoulder as he rose. Sirius was still standing next to him.

“What?” His voice gruff with sleep.

Sirius chirped, “I’m going to get some roasted groundnuts for a snack. Do you want to come?”

“Okay.”

 

Sirius started briskly for the door as two other people unidentifiable lingered around still discussing whatever. It was dark as they walked out. Bright headlights lit up Sirius’s face in quick succession as he stood on the sidewalk chewing his thumbnail, waiting for Remus to catch up.

“Onward.”

After a few minuets of stumbling around, they reached the main road and Sirius started to talk. About everything. Feverishly.

“Look, I’m quite tired. I can’t follow too many threads of conversation.”

“Oh my god, I am so sorry.” Sirius put his hand to his mouth. “You can tell me to shut up when I get like that. It drives everyone nuts.”

“Why do you want roasted groundnuts right now?” Remus looked at his watch and squinted till he could see its face. Sirius looked at it as well. “It’s ten-fifty-five, which is too late to get anything.”

“I guess you don’t know about night markets.”

Finally, in the main expressway under the fourth overpass, a group of small lights bloomed before them. Sirius located the stall he patronised and immediately fell into conversation with the women about their children as they packed heaps and heaps of nuts and salted popcorn and fried plantain Sirius kept talking with them after he paid, whilst Remus looked around him with incredulity.

“I don’t think I’ve ever been to this part of town at this time.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I’ve never been around here before”

“Oh yeah, these kinds of places are hidden because they’re the best. A secret. I like it.”

Sirius bid goodbye by the women as they attended to others. Remus and Sirius walked through the market, chasing each other. It was like Remus had been shaken out of slumber. Sirius laughed at everything; the potholes of muddy water they fell into, the way passersby looked at them, tutting and scolded them. It was riotous and full, on the precipice of something.

The market roared with the sound of grinding machine engines chugging along as women stood haggling with sellers over the price of chillies and tomatoes and onions. The stalls were lit by kerosene lamps hanging from rafters and people appeared and disappeared in shadow like the conjured. They quietly walked back through the stalls, weaving through stalls the heady scent of fried fish and frying onions. A man holding five chickens by their feet walked past them and asked if they wanted to buy any. They walked past the large abattoir at the end of the market where large cow heads sat on newspaper on the floor and whole goats stringed from the neck. There was laughter coming from inside one of the shops.

Remus bent at the waist with his satchel at his back then sat on the curb by a shut stall. Sirius squatted next to him fishing out the last kernel from his cone.

Remus said, “You know I feel like I **have** been here before.”

“The past is weird. Maybe you have.” Sirius rolled up the newspaper into a ball and threw it behind him. He continued. “Isn’t it strange how it can change you forever? Change the people you love? Change the way you love them?”

Remus nodded and kicked a plastic bottle by his feet.

A car horn blared.

Sirius patted his knee and laughed.

“Let’s go.”

 

Sirius stared at the back of Remus’s neck, the cotton collar of his light blue short-sleeved shirt, rucked up to the side by his strap of his satchel. The top of his white undershirt was showing. Downy hair at the back of his neck curled heavy wth perspiration. The light from the lamps hung off the side of his forearms. Suddenly, the walk back to the bus stop felt very intimate, even though they weren’t even walking side by side. In it, he’d discovered a trusting camaraderie, an ease and a comfort. That he was allowed to look at the back of him. It was a gift.

They didn’t look at each other until they got off the bus.

Remus smiled. “This was really nice, Sirius.” Sirius smiled down at his sandals. “Now I know where I can go if I’ve got late night hankering for grilled fish.”

Sirius shrugged.

Remus put his hand on his arm. “Thank you.”

Sirius nodded, now even more embarrassed by his stirring feelings.

“Can we hang out this weekend? I’ll be finished with my impending essay and then you can show me more secret places…. That is if you’re not doing anything.”

“Yeah, of course. We can.”

Remus let go. “I’ll see you.”

Sirius dragged his eyes from the ground to watch Remus walk down the street until he disappeared around the bend in the road.

 

Sirius spent the rest of the week elbow deep in paperwork for the clinic he was covertly partnering with. He first had a meeting with the student organisation. They tried to thrash out some issues they were facing from the state government’s crackdown on their non-violent protest a few weeks ago. He then brought up the matter of the clinic to them. The administration was trying to get more funding as the victims they admitted increase in number. This involved him drafting several letters to public health parastatals in Kano and its surrounding area connected to the federal health ministry and walking to and from the post office in frustration. He also visited the local government office on Friday with the secretary of the clinic. They waited for the chairman for three hours after the appointed time until he would see them. The secretary presented a confidential record of the number of patients they saw daily that came from his constituency. Sirius also presented the number of students from the Kano Central and Bichi government areas that were also being admitted into the clinic. With this leverage, he and the secretary tried to convince the chairman that the clinic was eligible for local and state funding. Two hours later, the chairman sent them out of his office and refused to help them saying, “Those men don’t deserve any of the good tax-payers’ money.”

“Those people pay their taxes too. They go about their daily lives just as anyone else does! They go to the voting booth like anyone and they vote for you!”

It was after this comment that they got booted out. The chairman’s dismissal was more biting than usual and Sirius felt as though it could become a trend among other chairmen which would curb the group’s activities. If other area chairmen began to seriously refuse him and started using law enforcement against the students, it could result in the beginning of clashes between students and police.

He mulled this over till he got home. He found James spread out on the couch in the living room leafing through large textbooks. He was wearing his reading glasses and looked up when Sirius came in.

“Hey, how did it go with Shaibu?” James asked.

“Ugh.” Sirius peeled off his sandals and threw his bag on the floor. He dropped onto the bed at James’s side.

“Not well then?” James tutted. “He’s scum.”

“I know. Doesn’t mean that the clinic, and the people it serves don’t deserve the money.” Sirius rolled over on his back. “I guess I’ll give them half of what they need for now. I still have a lot from Ali.”

“You know you’re not going to be able to afford to rent if you keep doing that. You’re not getting any richer.”

“So what? I know you’ll feed me.”

James pointed to his temple. “You’re not sound up there.” Sirius laughed.

“Don’t I know it. James, really. It’ll be fine…. I’ll mooch off you till you get married and have kids then I’ll get a job or something.”

“Or you get elected. You’ve got such good standing already, if you just considered —”

Sirius waved his hand in dismissal. “No, don’t say that. We’ve talked about this. I don’t want to hear it. I’ve had a long day.”

“You’re so fussy. What are you doing tomorrow?”

“Oh. I think I’m seeing Remus.”

“Really?”

Sirius opened an eye to look sceptically at James. “What’d you mean by ‘really?’”

James scratched his shoulder. “Nothing. I didn’t know you spent time together.”

“Don’t get jealous.”

“I’m actually not. In fact, it means that I can finally go over to Liza’s house without you distracting her. When do you think you’ll be back?”

“I don’t know. I’ll take my keys.” Sirius continued after some thought. “James. Do you have any hash left?”

James laughed. “Yes, it’s where it usually is. Now, go to sleep. It’ll keep you up if you smoke any now.”

 

In the morning, Sirius walked the thirty minutes to Remus’s rented room. A young girl opened the door. She was missing her two front teeth.

“Hello. I’m looking for Remus. He may not be expecting me but if you can tell him that Sirius is here to see him…”

“Okay.” She said brightly. She shut the door behind her and Sirius rested against the frame listening the sounds from inside. The sun was still making its appearance from behind the clouds. The street behind him was empty but for the occasional pedestrian. 

When the door opened again, it was Remus it revealed, cradling a blue plastic bowl filled with water and okra pods. Sirius smiled.

“It’s really early but come in.” Sirius stopped inside into the living room. The radio was on but turned down, playing soft RnB.

“I’ll be back, I’ve just got to finish this up.”

Sirius sat down and looked around politely.

“You can go up to my room, you’ll be more comfortable there. Do you want me to bring anything up?”

“Some tea, maybe.”

“Have you eaten? We’re frying yam for breakfast if you’d like.”

“Oh, yes.”

“Alright.” Remus walked down a corridor and vanished from sight. As a door creaked open, the smell of hot oil and the sizzle of the pan filtered out. Sirius went up the stairs.

In the room, he did feel more comfortable and lay on the rumpled mattress, warm like Remus had just woken; he watched a shaft of light hit the faded linoleum floor as clouds parted.

Remus came in later with a plate balanced on his left arm and two cups of black tea. He woke Sirius who’d dozed off in the warmth. “Come on, if you’re going to show up here so early, you’ve got to eat.” 

They shared slices of yam sitting with their backs on the wall while Sirius recanted the meeting he had with the chairman.

“Sirius, did you come here just to tell me about a meeting? Because there aren’t any buses that travel this early, so you must’ve walked.”

Sirius looked sheepish. “I’ve got a surprise for you.” He reached for the blue printed cotton bag he brought with him.

“Why am I nervous?” Remus said.

“Don’t be silly. It’s just some hash.”

“Oh.” 

Sirius brought out some rolled hash cigarettes from the bag. “We could walk somewhere and smoke and relax or anything. I mean, you don’t have to. I will, though.”

“No, it’s okay. I’ve done it before. Only once though.”

“You can tell me about that later. But now, you need to tell your landlady that you’re heading out. Hurry!”

“Don’t get worked up, I’m going.” Remus took the empty plate and went back to the kitchen. Then they set off out the house, Sirius waving to the children sitting in the front room.

As they walked up the hill towards the main road, Remus asked, “It’s getting to eight-thirty. Where are we going?”

“We’re going up to Dala. It’s a bit away but it’s worth it.”

“And what’s so special about this place in connection to hash?”

“It has very good views and it’ll be fairly empty around this time of year. It’ll be good.” Sirius turned to face Remus and smiled. “Don’t worry. This is how I hang out.”

They walked to the bus stop and waited for twenty minutes for a bus with a route going outside of the central township. It was a forty minute bus ride to the town’s outskirts and they waited at another stop and ate some roadside masa* on the way up to Dala. It was a small sleepy town with one market, three mosques, a church and a smattering of both Islamic and secular schools. It had a larger population of non-Hausa residents than most of Kano’s satellite towns and was popular for its set of hills.

Remus and Sirius got directions from an Igbo man on a bicycle and walked the rest of the way, going farther and farther way from the town till they got the foot of the park surrounding the hill. It had an arched entryway which led into swathes and swathes of green gardens. To the side of the pasture was a small office where a young woman in a tan hijab gave them their tickets and a map. They bought some water and roasted cashew nuts in plastic bottles from a boy sitting by the office.

The sun was closing in on its zenith as they started their trek. Small yellow butterflies hovered in the air as they walked through and past large shrubs and some small deciduous trees. The hills were dappled with outcroppings of aloe, and some of the leaves burst, spilling clear viscous fluid that dried sticky on the shale and chalk rock floor.

After some time, they saw the small town sitting behind them.

“I can see the bus stop from here.” Remus said.

“Where?”

He pointed at a speck in the distance. “There, look. Can you see that billboard we walked past?”

“Yes, I can see it now. How strange. I didn’t think we’d walked that far.”

They continued a little further till they reached a flat plane.

“I can’t see how we could go up onto that next section.” Sirius stood, looking up with one hand shading his face and his other hand on his waist. Remus was looking at the map while leaning on the rock beside him. He folded it back and stuffed it in his back pocket.

“It’s hot. We should’ve bought more water.” Remus took off his shirt leaving his undershirt which was soaked under the armpits and around the neck. He folded it up and lay on the rock with his head on it. Sirius looked at him from above.

“Don’t forget the reason we made this trip.” Sirius sat by his head and began to fish through his bag for the cigarettes. Sirius lay them out at his feet and lit the first one with a match. His cheeks hollowed around the joint. He exhaled and handed it out to Remus, holding it over his head until Remus raised his arm to take it.

“If we lie really still under this shadow we won’t need any water.”

“That’s not how the body works, Si.” Remus punctuated his sentence with a pull of the joint.

Sirius also took off his t-shirt and balled it up under his head and re-positioned his arms and said, “Tell me the story of how you ended up in Kano.”

“It’s a very long story.”

“You can make it short if you want. I’m waiting.”

“Ok, so I used to live in Adamawa, then we moved to Okene after my mom died and then we left when my father got the job at Gwarzo. I wanted to go to university here anyway. Ibadan is too far away.”

“Here’s another question since the door is open. You’re a little old to be a second year student.”

Remus laughed till he coughed, his back curling in as Sirius pouted on his knees.

“That’s not even a question! God, do you have to be so direct?”

“Of course!”

“You have no manners.”

“You don’t care.”

“If you must know, it’s because I failed the school leaving exams. Twice. Well, the first time I didn’t finish the exams because of my health and the second time, I didn’t get a high enough mark to get into Ahmadu Bello.” Remus grinned and poked Sirius with his elbow. “I bet you were a good student.”

“I was! I was… I miss school sometimes.”

They had another joint soon after and got reasonably wrecked and made each other laugh, telling tall strategic tales of heroism. They danced to Remus’s improvised humming, accompanied by an invisible brass band. Their chests were stained with watermelon juice as they threw chunks of fruit at each other and climbed up and down rock faces with their shirts tied around their heads. 

Sirius talked and talked and laughed at Remus’s jigs, his body shadowed by the sun behind him. They reached for each other in the haze of heat and fruit, and slept arm over leg, head on thigh, shoulder next to groin, mouth breathing on toe.

 

By the time they got off the rock and out of the park, the sun had started its daily painterly fall form grace like a biblical demon. Vvid reds, oranges and blues lit up the sky imaginable and Remus spent most of the downhill walk back towards the bus stop looking up at the sky. 

Out of a restlessness, they both climbed off the bus too early and were still some thirty minutes away from the city. Around them were a decrepit filling station, a shamble mechanic shop and potholed roads leading in many different directions. Sirius pulled him by the sleeve towards the petrol station.

“Come on, let’s get some drinks at least. I need some sugar in me.”

At one end of the station was a small store. A teenage girl wearing headphones sat behind the desk, partially hidden from view by many rows and rows of shaving sticks, soap, handkerchiefs and packets of crisps. They walked to the two fridges humming in tandem and Sirius chose two colas and paid for them whilst Remus genially surveyed the store, picking up fancy nail clippers and smiling to himself.

Outside, they say on the curb and opened the tops of the bottles on the metal grate surrounding the station. On occasion, a motorcycle would speed past. Sirius downed the cola in one and lay on the side of the road with his head in Remus’s lap. He held his head in tension when he realised that they were in public and could, would be shamed for what people would take as a more-than-friendly gesture between two boys in their twenties. He lifted his head in shame in a minute and Remus also looked away at the ground, fiddling with a loose stone.

“Sorry…” Sirius said to the ground.

“I don’t think anything of it, you know that right? You’re my friend, we’re friends… You can put your head in my lap if you want.” Remus said in a whisper.

“… Not everyone agrees with you. I’m fine with backlash because you know… but I don’t have to drag anyone down with me.”

“I think living in the open is a form of resistance. I’m pretty sure that’s something you’ve said at a meeting. Do you not practice what you preach?”

“That’s not fair! I do believe that. I also believe in picking battles. I can do both things. Don’t lecture on my life. It’s my existence. You don’t have the slightest idea what living in the open means.”

“Maybe not. But it’s a matter of time for me, and not fear.”

“You think so? Do you know what the Hisbah is?”

Remus said nothing.

“The Hisbah are Kano’s morality police. That’s right, morality. They have attacked friends of mine. Kicked their teeth in front of their mothers, spat on them in the street and jailed them for days with no warrant.” 

Sirius stood up and slung the bag over his head. “Do you know this persecution?” 

Remus sighed.

“You don’t. I’m going to find a schedule. It’s getting late. I have plans tomorrow morning.” Sirius walked back in the direction of the expressway linking the satellite towns to the city.

Remus finished the rest of his cola and watched ants journey along the untarred road. Looking up, he saw Sirius waving at him from the top pf the road. As he reached him, S pointed out that the next bus would arrive in fifteen minutes. 

The ride back was sleepy, the bus empty of passengers except them and a handful of workers going back into the city.

 

*

A delicate thing. Remus went to more meetings and to bars, to roadside food stalls gas-lamp lit sharing coconut candies and beef roasted over charcoal skewered with cabbage with Sirius. Other nights led them to aimless walks punctuated by awkward stop-starts and broken phrases. Remus found himself losing threads of whole conversations, lost in thought turning over statements from day-old exchanges. He wished the days went by faster, he wanted to vanish hours lingering between endless lectures in stifling rooms, dull file sorting in a post office and seeing him again. 

 

A reckoning as you watch him from behind a veil freshly established. And you notice the pepper seeds and the dust perpetual in its lingering on darkest skin. Whether it be moonrise or the commotion of light particles on his arms. Evident in the set of your mouth, obvious in the folds of your eyelids. Your mouth is dry, your throat closes up. Looking at you is baptism by immersion.

When he steps forward, things are painted black. Soul-making displacement.

“Why are you sitting over there?” He beckons you over.

His body is light falling on polished walls, oil spills on wet roads and the separation of mind from body. Dedicated to rapture and spun out of the fervent prayer of unholy nuns. Running water, rushing somewhere down dark paths of forearms. Aching like the carcass of a two-storey building, with rafters and beams jutting out of its polyester skin. In the hem of his shirt is the secret, the apple. You throw yourself at private violence, mythologizing the living in ardent masturbation. 

The lamb is a wolf is a lamb is a thief.

Remus has dreams of wild proportions. Jungles of fear, snake vines. The ugly gash of his father’s mouth. Molten black poring out of the eye sockets of his mother as he and Sirius stand entwined, Sirius a beacon of glowing light, his face in eternal laughter as the misery unfolding before them grows and grows, en masse, apocalyptical. Dreams where Sirius wears nothing but a grin and impassioned hands with which he drinks and soothes and his skin burns and Sirius keeps smiling until he is aflame, like a poisoned arrow he stays, festering in the corpse of the one despised.

He woke with his hand around himself, his mind blank with want when he bit into his pillow.

Throughout the next meeting, Remus chewed on the end of the cap of his blue ink pen and sat on his hands, like a child caught. His mind roamed through a catalogue of frenzies at every instance he caught sight of Sirius.

 

*

They were in a crowded sports bar (there was a Europa League semi on that night). Sirius was not drinking, but having a heated discussion with one of the patrons who’d tossed around an off-colour comment about the amount of publicity the AIDS clinic was getting. 

Sirius had just come from a radio interview about the clinic, with some of the patients and the secretary. He showed up at Remus’s house still in his dress shirt and tie, disheveled and frustrated, bristling with energy and undirected anger. It seemed that the interviewer asked about Sirius’s sexuality during the interview. Remus suggested they walk to let off steam and they ended up at the sports bar when their legs got tired. 

Now Sirius was turned in his chair facing backwards arguing in Hausa with a middle-aged man in a football jersey. 

“ _If you would look past your ignorance, what you’ve been told, dictated by society and embrace what is true, that is love and acceptance then you would understand me. Any of those boys could your brothers, your sons, your friends, people who work with you_.” Sirius said with his fists clenched tight on the table.

“Oho! _Now I know where I recognised you from, you’re that silly student leader right? With the rallies and unnecessary clamouring! And now with this nonsense about a clinic for filth who deserve the death they’ve got! You do not respect this town, the government or your parents. You do not even respect your God!_ ”

Some of the other people in the bar were jeering at Sirius now. The man started laughing.

“ _You’re filth just like them_ , a homosexual!”

Sirius turned back in his chair. Remus scrambled for something to say, to do, looking at Sirius who was biting his lip, it looked so painful like to draw out blood.

“We should go, come on.” Remus whispered to Sirius.

The man turned to the people around his table as they joked around and watched the television. It was as if nothing happened, as the hum of the bar returned to normal levels in a few minutes.

Sirius sat still, looking into the distance as the crowd moved away to other tables, then got up and left the bar. Remus followed and they started down the street to the main road.

“I’m sorry I dragged you out.” Sirius said looking at his feet as they walked.

“It’s okay. We’re friends, aren’t we?”

“Are we?”

Remus paused. Sirius was either still pissed and looking for a fight or had deciphered the meaning behind all of Remus’s glances.

“Because I’m wondering what you really want.” Sirius continued.

“To change things, to change myself… I’m young, what else could I want?”

Sirius laughed and turned to face him. Some older men looked at them as they passed.

“Are you going to let me sleep in your bed? You know since I’m a raging fag and all.”

Remus hunched his shoulders. It was windy and he was wearing a thin grey t-shirt that said REGGAE AGAINST RACISM.

“Yeah, I’m going to let you stay over. Because I like you, you’re my friend. Let’s go, I have work tomorrow.”

Sirius pulled Remus back by the sleeve. His heart jumped double time.

“You don’t understand anything. You’ll only showing up to the meetings to kill time.” Cutting words with a sneer, there could’ve been a smile in there. A threat, some suggestion at hidden knowledge. Remus’s skin ran hot. He licked his lips.

“I come to those meetings because I’m concerned, like you. Just because I’m not up there spilling ideology doesn’t mean I don’t feel the same.”

“You only come for entertainment. I see you, I notice you in the back, quiet. And then waiting behind to talk to me after…”

“I have no idea where you’re getting these ideas from. Sirius, we’re in the middle of the street, let’s get to mine and then we can talk.”

Remus pulled his arm along.

The lights in the house were turned off. Remus felt along the walls in the dark as he climbed the stairs. Sirius was following so closely behind him that he could feel the heat coming off him on his lower back. They entered his room like that, separated by centimetres of air.

Sirius paced the floor of the room from the edge of the dresser to the window and back whilst Remus smoked on the mattress to hide his unease. He ashed on the windowsill just missing Sirius on his turn back towards the dresser.

“You need to stop. Sit down, you’re scaring me.” Remus mumbled through his near-closed mouth around a cigarette.

“… It’s not that this… antagonism is unfamiliar, I just… it’s always fresh. It always burns.”

“Come here and lay down. Have a smoke.”

Sirius grumbled before landing on the bed with a humph, holding out his hand for a cigarette. Remus gave him the one in his mouth and lit a new one.

“Can you smoke in here? Won’t the family downstairs be upset?”

“They’re asleep now and it doesn’t matter.”

Remus sat with his legs stretched in front of him and his hands in his lap. 

Remus added, “Come closer, come on.”

Sirius turned on his side, his eyes widened and then he crawled across the bed to put his head in Remus’s lap. When Sirius settled, Remus set one hand on his chest and the other behind Sirius’s head.

“Try to sleep.”

“What about you?”

Remus scoffed.

Sirius reached for the hand on his chest and held it to his cheek for some minutes till he slept.

 

Remus woke to Sirius’s back, his vertebrae jutting out like small anthills. Remus could see his right hand held away from his body, a cigarette leaning out between the long thin fingers. The divots between his fingers were ashy.

Remus put his head on Sirius’s arm and sucked on the glowing cigarette. Sirius turned to him, his eyes soft and pleading. He put the cigarette out on the floor and leaned back to stroke Remus’s cheek.

“I hope I’m not misunderstanding this.”

Like peeling a tangerine slowly as the acidic juice bursts, Remus felt an unwrapping in his chest. In the moment where Sirius’s hand stilled on his cheek and morning light hit the side of his face, a suspect calm came over him. He kissed Sirius’s shoulder with as much tenderness as he could muster from his shaking body. He looked up at Sirius who smiled brokenly.

“I can’t believe it. God, I think I’m going to cry.” Sirius laughed and swung his legs onto the bed as Remus lay on his back next to him.

Sirius asked, “Why didn’t you tell me how you felt? I know how obvious I was.” 

“Well, I wasn’t sure, I… it’s very new for me. I don’t know.” He turned his head to look at Sirius. “I’m not too confident in it. I…”

“Can I kiss you? Please.”

“Okay.”

Remus’s voice cracked on the second syllable as Sirius leaned down and pressed his lips to his. The kiss seemed to last an eternity. Sirius pulled back and said, “Could you open your mouth? I want to taste.” Remus obliged him and Sirius slid his tongue into his mouth very slowly like it pained him to go any faster. Carefully, Remus placed his hand on Sirius’s ribs and touched his tongue. At this, Sirius’s body sighed and he lay his body over Remus. He pulled his mouth away and put his head on Remus’s chest.

“Was that your first time kissing a boy?” Sirius asked.

“No… there was a boy, in Gwarzo…”

Sirius raised his head and mouthed at Remus’s neck, saying, “What is his name?” He licked Remus’s earlobe.

“Farouk.” Remus left his cheeks heat up. 

“How far did you two go? Hm?” Sirius moved his lips to the hollow at the base of his throat and then his collarbones.

“Not very far… His… father was a priest.”

Sirius pushed up the hem of Remus’s shirt until it reached the top of his shoulders. Remus lifted his arms and Sirius pulled the shirt off him.

“What about you? Who have you been with?”

“A few, here and there. No one important. Mostly white boys while I was at Cambridge.” Sirius knelt before him and smiled. “You’ll think I’m terrible but I’ve been thinking about you a lot at night.”

Remus laughed.

They made quick work of their trousers and through gritted teeth, Sirius pulled out Remus’s soul through the highest spiritual manifestation, pushing and pulling until Remus finally opened his mouth and let his tongue in and groaned like thirst, like hunger, around his mouth. Sirius after undressed completely and lay like a painting on the sheets and performed with Remus’s fingers in his mouth which he bit into, uttering his name under his breath like a supplication at death’s door.

 

They slept through the morning, Remus missing his shift at the local post office that morning,and woke in the early hours of the afternoon. Sirius pulled on his clothes grudgingly, kissing Remus as he buttoned up his shirt. They walked down the stairs hand-in-hand until they got to the sitting rom on the ground floor where the mother sat watching soaps. 

At the door, Sirius laughed into his neck and briefly twined in his fingers in Remus’s, waved goodbye and walked away.

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Words in italics are spoken in Hausa. Thank you for reading. Thanks also to flourescentgrey for their advice and support. The word "masa" is a cake made from maize flour, usually eaten with a stew or with honey. Dala Hill is a very real, very romantic place.  
> Remus's address is: 237, Kabo Bello Way off Rimfar Shehu Road, Rimin Gata, Kano Central, Kano.  
> You can reach me on tumblr as @forestgospel.


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